![\"\"](\"http:\/\/imgs.sfgate.com\/blogs\/images\/sfgate\/parenting\/2011\/03\/15\/skid_herb_caen620x411.JPG\")
We moved from city to suburb, which was not an easy transition for me.<\/p>\nWe moved from city to suburb, which was not an easy transition for me.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I was born and reared in San Francisco, playing on the warm asphalt of the ethnically diverse Western Addition neighborhood as a child.\u00a0 Days were filled with the screams of playing children, sometimes mixed with choruses of gospel music from the local church, all desperate to drown out the fire engines and police sirens that came through neighborhood every hour.\u00a0 Passing 5 McAllister buses would shake our house, while the sharp noises from electrical sparks of rabbit ears jumping off of its power lines would wake me up from my naps.\u00a0 The noises would end around dinner time, as the sidewalks emptied into brownstone tenements filled with families hiding from serial killers, gangs and the outside people that brought violence.\u00a0 The bar just around the corner would come to life at this time, and I could hear the dusky jazz and blues notes slip into our third floor flat.\u00a0 Outside my window, the drunk men steadied themselves against walls, parked cars and, perhaps, their own misery.<\/p>\n
My mother believed what lesser informed people tend to do now.\u00a0 She believed that darker people brought only violence and poverty, and scuttled us to weekly real estate showings in quieter neighborhoods. Our family finally settled into a Victorian flat in the cooler Richmond district, less than a mile away from our Western Addition tenement.\u00a0 Here in the Richmond district, however, a slower lifestyle hovered underneath the heavy fog that would blanket the neighborhoods from ocean beach to 6th Avenue.\u00a0\u00a0 The Richmond was quieter, flanked on its northern and western ends by the Pacific Ocean and its rip tide graveyard, and on the east on by the lush, overhanging shade trees of Golden Gate Park.\u00a0 On the northern end of the Richmond lay the Golden Gate Bridge and the edges of the Presidio.\u00a0 We were still city dwellers, where diverse cultures were pushed together in matchbox sized homes that were separated by two thin walls.<\/p>\n
In this new part of my world, I was able to play with my childhood best friend until dinner time.\u00a0 We were the youngest in our neighborhood, and would never be invited to join in on the street games.\u00a0 Instead, we\u2019d play with her garden hose or make mud pies in my little dirt backyard.\u00a0\u00a0 We would ride our bikes through Golden Gate Park on the weekends and take a little paddle boat around Stow Lake.\u00a0 Sometimes, we\u2019d just look at the flowers in the arboretum or become part of the foot traffic.\u00a0 The park was always nice because there was trees and flowers, bits of nature that only seemed to grow out of flower pots and planned asphalt boxes out in the urban spaces.<\/p>\n
After moving to Los Angeles, my husband and I went on an exhaustive search for homes.\u00a0 We chose to live in Ventura County, where sprawling homes seemed to have at least one large, towering tree in the backyard.\u00a0 Our home had four tall\u00a0 trees that shrouded our back neighbor\u2019s home, while ivies and bushes grew along our side fences, guarding our backyard from prying neighbors who coveted our avocados.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.thepeterscompany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/tree-fall.jpg\")
The towering pine trees in our backyard have been around since our home was built sometime in the mid-70s.\u00a0 It has afforded us shade and privacy, and made me feel as if I were standing in the middle of Golden Gate Park.\u00a0 However its heavy, spreading branches began to block the sunlight from hitting a little orange tree, and later became entangled with the avocado tree branches..\u00a0 That was our little problem, until some time earlier this year when the trees became everyone else\u2019s business.<\/p>\n
We were only in the friendly greeting stages with our new next door neighbors when they fired off a certified letter, warning us that the tall trees in our yard threatened to crush their own home in inclement weather.\u00a0 The neighbor behind us, a former New Yorker who just retired, paid us a visit to inform us that our trees not only blocked his view of the mountains, but had been depositing leaves and round little balls into his pool.<\/p>\n
The trees, which had remained rather quiet and honorable during their backyard tenure, had now become the subject of threats and lawsuits.\u00a0 Our back neighbor never failed to call us, his tone becoming more melodramatic and spiteful with each week.\u00a0 He mentioned a gangster connection back east, and a lawyer friend connection that would not hesitate to have us destroy our trees.\u00a0\u00a0 The neighbor was asking that we shoulder a substantial cost to meet his needs, and my husband answered in kind with million dollar tidbits of sarcasm and condescension.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As for me, the idea that our carpetbagging out-of-state neighbors would disregard the sanctity of these trees seemed all too un-Californian for me, especially since our wide yard spaces and the healthy brown soil were meant more lovely green foliage than concrete pools and their faux stone waterfalls.<\/p>\n
My husband, however, was in favor of cutting the trees.\u00a0 While Southern California has very little in the way of inclement weather, there are strong Santa Ana winds that cut through neighborhoods, sending wind chimes into chaos, destroying expensive hair styles and sending outdoor lunch service napkins into cyclones.\u00a0 None of these winds are on the scale of what one would expect during a baseball game at Candlestick Park, but it is enough to make one of our neighbors believe that our tree was going to destroy his collection of outdoor Catholic fountains.<\/p>\n
But there were other, more logical reasons.<\/p>\n
The trees, as my husband and gardener would explain, were becoming too large for our yard.\u00a0 They dropped too many small round things onto our grass, stopped the growth of our other trees and would become a menace to us if that deadly Hollywood tornado decided to spin its way through our backyard.\u00a0 The largest tree had become an unruly pine, with no ability to manage the spread of the branches that had become like gnarled fingers grasping onto every piece of green life that was struggling to survive in our yard.<\/p>\n
Tearing the trees down would be the most logical move, because life in suburbia is about order among large homes, structured families, well behaved terraces and trees that have been carefully coiffed like poodles ready for the dog show.\u00a0\u00a0 This is how proper, well-behaved trees are in urban areas, plunked down into little square plots that had been stripped of its concrete and replaced by dirt and wire or a planter box.\u00a0 These trees never become tall, and remain little green bandages trying to add spirit to urban blight.<\/p>\n
I grew up among such little trees, as my San Francisco of flats and brown tenements had no room for trees.\u00a0 There was always a square backyard of dirt and clusters of grass and weeds, but there was no real need for such large trees and its buckling roots when Golden Gate Park was always my backyard.\u00a0 There, among the chaotic forest of tall trees, I frolicked beneath branches or slid down hills of dirt, dead leaves and hidden twigs that would tear at my blue jeans..\u00a0 Even as an adult, I would bypass the faster thoroughfares homes in favor of a slower drive beneath the trees of Golden Gate Park.<\/p>\n
Losing the trees in my yard might have been essential, but it was no less heartbreaking.\u00a0 While trees were the essence of my escape from a lonely home life and a noisy city and, in its present state, a way to block my view of my adjacent neighbors and the daily misery of living in Southern California.\u00a0\u00a0 I would now have to look at the homes of the folks who have dumped Jesus videos in my mailbox after I allowed homosexuals into the neighborhood, or at the strangers who give me a funny look because I am the only Asian within a five block radius.<\/p>\n
In its place, however, we decided to put up two bottlebrush, two cherry blossoms and a trumpet tree, all surrounded by a field of African daises.\u00a0 All trees are still in its infancy stages, looking as little thin twigs alongside some large, dying tree trunks and a stark white sprinkler system on a lonely dirt hill.\u00a0 Someday, these trees will grow into full adulthood, dropping dynamic red flower bombs into my back neighbors yard or dumping thousands of fluttering cherry blossom petals into swimming pools.<\/p>\n
I never said that I was a good neighbor, too.<\/p>\n
(c)2014 Slow Suburban Death.\u00a0 All rights reserved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We moved from city to suburb, which was not an easy transition for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21,43],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}