Estoy Nueces

I am very happy this morning. I went to the dentist for the first time in a year and a half (when the dental insurance went away, a foreshadowing of the layoff). Last week I chipped a tooth. Last night I realized it was not part of a tooth, really, it was a crown of a much root canaled, drilled, filled, and crowned, tooth. It hasn't hurt me, but I didn't want it to have an emergency, so I went to see the dentist. If it came down to a new $700 crown, I figured I would have to just go with pulling the dang tooth. But, no, my sweet conservative dentist said that if it wasn't hurting me, not to worry about it. If the rough edge didn't bother me, and it doesn't, then there is no need to fix something that isn't really broke. Hooray!!

And I'm happy because my little catalpa tree is now big enough to see in the bathroom window without climbing up on the edge of the tub to look out and down. Since I was born, my family has had some beautiful catalpa trees. When I lived on King Street in Amarillo we had a big catalpa by the drive and my sister and I would take its huge leaves and make fans or plates or hats or doll clothes or whatever from them. When we moved to the country we had lots of catalpas that were huge by the time I left there in college. I spent the better part of one summer reworking the flower beds surrounding the catalpas and installing a brilliant irrigating system (I thought. The things my parents allowed me to do!).

When I bought my own house in Carrollton, I moved some of the little catalpas (if you have catalpas, you will always have little catalpas) to my new place. I was only in that house 9 years, but one catalpa was huge by the time we left. Again, I dug up a little catalpa, plopped it in a pot and moved it to Austin.

When we got to Austin and had such a beautiful home surrounded by oaks, there really was no place for a catalpa. It is truly a tree to plant in the Panhandle, just so you have A tree in a place with none. It just didn't seem right to plant my little catalpa by a stately live oak. So I left it in the pot through the hot summer of 1999.

After a hard freeze or two over the winter, spring of 2000 came along, and along came leaves on the catalpa. Catalpas easily survive winter when they are planted, but a plant in a pot hardly stands a chance after a freeze, but this little trooper survived. Again, it made it through a hot summer and I still didn't know what to do with it.

Another winter, not nearly as freezing, and spring of 2001 came along and leaves on the poor catalpa in a pot again. This time, since it was such a survivor, I knew it needed a place in the ground where it could stretch its roots out. I chose a sunny sunny spot to the side of the house. If the tree grew here, and there was no reason it couldn't, it would shade the bathroom window and help cool the house through the noonday sun.

That was last summer and now the tree it easily six feet tall and visible from inside of the house. I love my little heritage catalpa. It's one of my connections to my Panhandle home (you don't want to get me started on my cherry tree).