Down on Maple Street*

* — Sung to the tune of Bob Seger’s “Down on Main Street” ... on a day which also has included such songs as “Rocky Top,” “Memories,” “Black Water” (is that the song’s name: “Oh, black water, keep on rollin’ / Mississippi moon, won’t you keep on shinin’ on me”?) and something classical that I believe was composed by Mozart, but because it’s instrumental, I can’t very well post lyrics or anything ... though I could hum a few bars (whatever happened to that audioblogger thingie I always wanted to try out, anyway?) and everyone would recognize it, immediately, in spite of my occasional tendency to sing off-key.

: )

Every fall, the most beautiful tree in my neighborhood is a maple tree located, appropriately enough, on Maple Street. In certain years, other trees come close to matching its brilliance, but so far, this is the best one I have ever seen. Or at least noticed, around here.

It’s squished in between a couple of other trees, and they always seem to take even longer to turn than this one — which actually seems to revel in the change of seasons, taking its own sweet time, also, to reveal the brilliant red-orange of its leaves.

The tree itself is somewhat unsightly, thanks to some apparently botched pruning attempts to keep its branches out of the power lines running alongside it ... which, to me, brings up a question of imminent domain:

Which came first, the tree or the power lines?

Those leaves, though! I watch for them every time I drive up Maple Street. Which, over the past several days, has been quite frequently whilst road construction workers grade and then pave (after previously this summer having half-assed patched, in random and seemingly unneeded places, to varying degrees of ineffectiveness) my road, one block over.

Other trees around, including the ones in my yard, are not as pretty.

I remember when The Lovely and I attempted, a few years ago, to plant some daylilies. We put them in the ground, and her landlady ended up having to redo them, but when they eventually bloomed, they were a disappointing dull peach color.

Some lilies are quite vibrant, and I remarked to The Lovely about how the ones “we” planted were not as colorful as others I’ve seen.

“I guess you can’t always judge a flower by how beautiful it looks,” I said.

She looked at me for a second, and then said, “Well, what else are you going to judge it by?”

Good question.

: )

My favorite part about Maple Street is not the maple tree, though.

My favorite part is the memory of driving up that street more than five years ago and thinking about a girl I knew, whom I had managed to piss off for about the 29th time in our then-relatively short time knowing each other. This time, though, I had annoyed her to the point of not speaking to me at all, and I thoroughly believed I had done irreparable damage to our relationship.

And then, like an honest-to-God lightning bolt out of the late-spring sky, I had this thought:

It’s OK: She’s thinking about you right at this moment, too.

I smiled. It was a beautiful moment.