Mourning the Loss of Our Tree-Lined Driveway

When we came home from San Francisco a few weekends ago and turned on our driveway, our jaws flapped open. The trees that lined our driveway were gone.

We loved those trees They bore sweet loquat fruits, which Evan loved to pick and eat. And they gave us a bit of privacy from the house next door -- a nice luxury, given how close the homes on our street sit next to each other. Steering up our driveway, with the trees in my peripheral vision, I felt like I was driving home to something much bigger. And looking out our windows at home, we saw green -- a lot of it.

Now it's gone. In a misunderstanding of unfortunate proportions, the neighbors assumed that we hated the trees, since they were intruding on our side of the property line. Sigh -- had we been in town that weekend, we could have stopped them and explained the misunderstanding -- but we weren't. So now the trees are gone, even though neither us nor the neighbors actually wanted them to go.

I'm still feeling a strange sense of loss. When I look out the window now, all I see is the cracked, grey stucco of the neighbors' house. I can see in their windows. And driving up the driveway now, it's stark, almost naked, where the trees once were.

The neighbors plan to erect a vinyl fence in the trees' place. But I'm already trying to figure out how to get a new crop of trees there.

This isn't the first tree loss we experienced. Soon after we moved in, we cut down a tree that was hitting our foundation and impacting our plumbing. But as soon as I had it taken down, I regretted it. Did I make a huge mistake, taking out a big source of shade for the backyard? It finally was moot a year ago, when we added an addition to the house -- if we hadn't cut down that tree in 2004, we would have had to in 2006 anyway.

Given my recent tree loss, this Meghan Daum column in the L.A. Times hit home. She too bought an overpriced, small home in 2004 -- and wonders whether her house's character has been altered now that its signature palm tree is gone:

My palm tree is gone and my property, purchased three years ago at an unmistakably California price, is a little less California than it once was. It's also just a little less. My house — a boxy Mediterranean bungalow whose flat asphalt roof resembles the tip of a pencil eraser when viewed on Google Earth — is like something an elf would occupy, or maybe Little Red Riding Hood, if she struck out on her own. That's why the palm tree was such a crucial part of the equation. Its large trunk and fang-like fronds offset the tininess of the house and gave the property gravitas — or at least visibility.

Moreover, every morning when I went outside to get the newspaper, it reminded me that no matter how mundane life was, I was living not only the American dream (homeownership) but the even more coveted California dream (really expensive, palm tree-inclusive homeownership).

Sometimes you have to count on the little things -- like a tree-lined driveway -- to try and feel better about that crushing mortgage.