On Sunday, I surprised Rob with a road trip to Burkittsville, Maryland, site of the the jittery cinematic legend known as The Blair Witch Project. I had been there before, soon after the movie was released, and witnessed the small town as a hotbed of rustic capitalism, the front porch of every house festooned with authentic Blair Witch paraphernalia at cutthroat prices.
By this visit, Burkittsville had settled back into ominous quiet. A beautiful little village with one stop sign, there was nonetheless something eerie about it. “We should get out and walk around,” Rob remarked. But I didn’t want to, and shortly thereafter, he agreed. There was no commerce. There was nobody visible on the streets or in the houses. There was nothing at all welcoming about it; indeed, despite the bright and sunny afternoon, it couldn’t have been more forbidding, a Shirley Jackson story come to life.
Earlier that day, Rob and I had had another creepy moment. Our new next-door neighbors came by and mentioned that they are having part of the tree between our back yards cut off, as those branches are apparently a favorite vantage from which the neighborhood birds like to poop on their porch. The tree is actually in our yard and merely overhangs theirs. It is the largest tree on the block, and it shades our houses in the summer. When I wake up in the morning, I look at its branches silhouetted against the sky. Goblin’s squirrels scramble up and down and around the trunk at all hours. It’s not the most beautiful tree in the world, but it’s there, and it’s established, and it’s the focal point of our garden, and while I don’t dispute the neighbors’ right to cut whatever hangs over their yard, I found the discussion oddly disquieting.
“We’ve been talking to everyone about it, and they say it’s just a weed anyway,” they said. Of course, they haven’t been talking to everyone about it. Two notable people, Rob and I, were left out of that particular loop. “Everyone we talked to wanted to know why anyone would let a weed grow into a tree,” they went on, then offered to go halfsies with us on having the entire thing removed. I felt suddenly like Dorothy, faced with Almira Gulch’s picnic basket.
Okay, so it’s a weed. But it’s my weed, and Rob’s and Goblin’s and the squirrels’, and, yes, the birds’.
People are coming this week to saw off some of its branches, but the weed, um, I mean tree, will live on.
