The Bush sprouted in front of the house long before my infancy. It had been there when my newlywed parents signed their first mortgage, when my eldest brother was in kindergarten, and as child after child joined our growing flock, the evergreen seemed to push itself to accommodate them all. At times I wondered if the tiny plant had just wanted a place to rest, a safe haven, disturbed only by the occasional bird. Whatever its original dream, it was blessed to be the guardian of a hoard of children. My mother quickly deemed it to be an eyesore, but at the same time stressed that the front yard was not to be played in under any circumstances. “Too close to the road,” she said, over and over.“You could get hurt.” So, the Bush became a playground, rocket, even a babysitter at times. A prickly, rough governess, but imaginative to its visitors.

All this happened while I watched in her shadow. The sweet, soft fern-like leaves fell over me like a curtain to my personal theater. Every time I tried to slip in, I hesitated with the fear of falling to the ground, not tall enough to swing into the cockpit of my siblings’ world. I pressed my face against the sun-speckled screen door, waiting for someone to reach the handle for me. Then I would creep to the edge of the cool concrete of the Porch, ’til, at last, I could reach the first branch and swing into Never-land. My youngest brother and I fashioned hats of the leaves and swords from sticks, displaying our summers worth of shells all along the grassy edge; somehow we failed to notice that, one by one, the nest was being emptied.

The day came that my mother got her wish. The shovels and six hard-muscled men arrived in the early morning, as if they had been whisked out of a bottle to do her bidding. From my room, I watched the limbs of the Bush recede, thinner and thinner, until at last they crumpled into a pile of twisted roots and green feathers. As the day turned over on its side, showing the red of her smile against the gold of her eyes, the Bush left the world in a spicy, fresh-cut grass assault on the senses, its bald place in the front yard tilled under but still full of her memories. My mother was overjoyed for the potential to get a new porch, unable to mourn the plant with any greater loss than “The shade was nice.”

The evergreen’s death bought an adventure of the house getting a face-lift. Aged yellow vinyl — not the kind you put music on, the kind that falls off a house every weekend — became caramel siding, plaster white was painted sienna desert, another bathroom and bedroom were added, yet the front remained a graveyard. It may have been filled in with rocks and the occasional sprinkle of flowers — contrasted by a shiny new door with a heron posed in frosted glass — but the old concrete was still there, bare and bleached by the sun as it had never been before. Yet our house was deemed improved because the Bush was gone, even when my mother’s new porch had to be postponed ’til the van and trucks were in working condition. Perhaps after the back deck was finished, or maybe when the ponds were all cleaned out would allow for some time. Summer after summer, fall bled into winter over and again for 9 years, eating away at the little porch until my mother fell on the now-shattered steps. At last, the concrete went the way of the screen door. Chocolate-brown and cream aluminum would be replaced by a wooden construction. As the house gained its many coats of appeal, it seemed to lose the charm and character it had once held behind the Bush.

The destruction and rebuilding of the walls changed the home in more ways than how it looked. My mother, due to her fall, found herself more and more often lying on the couch, hardly sleeping due to her pain. My father decided the lawn needed more attention than anything inside. A garden was planted and harvested, then allowed to go to seed. There was more than enough room for all of us now, but I still felt silenced, hushed. The door had been closed on me for so long, but I knew I was not going to wait any more years for the hole to be filled in my life. I was ready to move out of the shadows and find my own roots.

Life is not a concrete brick to be chipped away, moved from place to place ’til all that remains is a shadow of dust. It is a season of seasons, leaves that layer upon each other. Shells are buried, uprooting happens, clinging to a withered leaf allows for nothing but suffocation. I will always love my mother’s soft, hazel eyes and the twinkling in my father’s smile; the sunrise is just as amazing from their new porch as those long-lost sunsets. But I am not writing their story anymore.

Nothing proved this more than the view from my window. It wasn’t the familiar arms of a friend waving back at me, but the back of a rigid tree long since dead. A beautiful mummy, but only a band-aid over what used to be; when I would sit on the highest branch and watch the explosions of color in the 4th of July night sky, or a sunset on a Tuesday. Wrapping myself in what could have been is as blinding as merely dreaming of what could be; while I was waiting for somewhere to let me grow, all I had to do was turn toward the light.