Quercus Gambelii (Gambel Oak)

I named the trees “the witch trees” because they seemed to have come right out of a fairy tale book, and it felt like a crinkled old witch might walk out of their shadows and offer me a shiny red apple. All these trees wove back and forth in a jolting sort of way, like they’d grown in several dozen little bursts but couldn’t quite figure out which way was up. The bark was a dark grey, almost a black, and had splotches of white moss across its zig-zagging trunks. The branches jutted out like streamers that had been frozen in the middle of a breeze. All its leaves looked like a little kid had tried to cut out a snowflake, and it had turned out an oblong blob of squiggled cutting. The branches that held the leaves were sparse along the base of the trunk but branched out like an upside-down broom and spread the snowflake-leaves thick enough to shade the entirety of the little forest’s ground. This dark patch of forest, combined with the dark bark of the trunks, gave the entire thing a spooky feeling, at least to an eight-year-old.

There was a tree in my backyard that the two neighbor boys told me was struck by lightning. It used to have a tree house in its branches, but it’d fallen down, and now the plywood floor and table were set up under the nearby trees. The neighbor boys also told me they’d seen strange homeless men in the trees in our backyard that sometimes stopped by the fallen-down treehouse. Of course I believed them. I couldn’t see why they’d be lying. But what I didn’t realize at the time is that the little strip of forest separated the golf course up the hill, and the only men I’d see in our forest were three drunk golfers.

They came barreling down the hill backwards on a golf cart one afternoon, and I watched them from across the yard. They rolled backwards down the stairs I’d dug in the dirt with a shovel so my brothers and I could climb easier up to our new lightning-struck treehouse we’d inherited. They almost seemed to be speaking a different language as two of the men got out and started trying to push the cart up the hill, but only succeeded in tearing up my newly-dug dirt steps.