About This Piece

I have been living in the suburbs of Philadelphia since I was ten years old. At that time my neighborhood was surrounded by seemingly endless fields and forests, I spent most of my adolescence there. Slowly they have been shrinking and in the past four years I've watched the last of them disappear. In one soon to be parking lot I encountered a scene that burnt an image in my mind. There was a huge old white birch tree and I remember being sad to see it go. They paved all the way to its trunk. It wasn't long before the tree died. It finished dropping its leaves and for one week it stood there - this pure white tree growing from a dark nothingness, perfectly summarizing the constriction of the world around me as I've grown up and lost my boyhood memories.