LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the short story “The Pear Tree’s Witnesses.”
When I was sixteen, my aunt Rosa asked me
to help prove that the pear tree behind
the old laundry had belonged to our
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family. The laundry was being converted
into apartments, and the builder had
promised to move any tree with documented
neighborhood significance. Rosa remembered
our grandfather carrying pears home in his
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cap. From that memory she had built a firm
conclusion: he must have planted the tree
after returning from military service in
1947.
We met urban forester Dr. Mina Choi beside
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the tree on a cold March morning. Rosa
brought a folder of family photographs.
Dr. Choi brought an increment borer, a
tool shaped like a long silver straw. I
brought a notebook and, though I did not
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admit it, the expectation that one of them
would win.
Families often arrange the past into
parcels. This person planted that tree;
this recipe came from that kitchen. A
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claim becomes a fence, and memory makes
the fence look older than it is. I
understand now why Rosa wanted a single
planter. Ownership seemed to protect the
story from being washed into the general
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history of the block. At sixteen, however,
I merely thought she was being stubborn.
Dr. Choi twisted the borer through the
trunk and withdrew a thread of wood no
thicker than a shoelace. She slid it into
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a grooved wooden tray so it would not curl
and disturb the order of the rings. Under
a hand lens, alternating bands recorded
seasons of quick and slow growth. Some
narrow bands matched known drought years.
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After accounting for the uncollected
center of the trunk, Dr. Choi estimated
that the tree had begun growing around
1959, give or take three years.
Rosa tapped her photograph folder against
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her knee. “Then the tree is wrong,” she
said, as if it had failed an examination.
Her earliest clear picture showed our
grandfather beside a pear sapling, but no
building appeared in the background. Dr.
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Choi explained that the ring count could
estimate age, not tell us where the
photograph was taken, who held the shovel,
or why.
We spent the afternoon knocking on doors.
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Most neighbors remembered eating the pears
but not the planting. Mr. Lau, who had
lived across the alley since childhood,
gave us a different kind of evidence. He
recalled a nursery truck losing several
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young trees when its rear gate opened on
Calder Avenue. Rather than let the
bare-root saplings dry out, laundry
workers and nearby residents planted them
wherever they found space. Mr. Lau could
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not supply the year, but he remembered
carrying water in a dented blue kettle and
being scolded for spilling half of it.
Rosa distrusted the story until Mr. Lau
produced a neighborhood-club photograph.
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It showed six people along the laundry
wall, each beside a thin trunk. Our
grandfather stood at one end with a
shovel; Mr. Lau’s mother stood at the
other. On the back, someone had written,
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“Trees from the Calder spill, spring
1960.” The core had given us an
approximate beginning. The photograph and
recollection supplied an event,
participants, and a reason. Neither method
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alone had produced the whole account.
By late afternoon we returned to the pear
tree. Rosa placed her palm on its bark.
“He still planted it,” she said, but her
he no longer excluded everyone else. We
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documented the core estimate, scanned the
photograph, and recorded Mr. Lau telling
the kettle story twice. The second time,
the kettle was green. Dr. Choi noted both
colors in the transcript rather than
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choosing one; the inconsistency cautioned
us about detail without erasing the larger
memory, which the dated photograph
supported.
The builder eventually moved the tree only
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thirty feet, into the apartment courtyard.
At the small dedication, Rosa read the
names written beneath the photograph. She
did not call it our family’s tree. She
called it “the laundry pear, planted by
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whoever was nearby.” That phrase sounded
vague to me then. Years later, it sounds
exact. The tree’s history had not lost its
roots; it had grown more of them, braided
beneath the property lines we had mistaken
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for the boundaries of the story.