We rented, but we cared.
It seems against our nature not to care. Caring for ones shelter is surely innate. But it wasn’t ours, and this became more and more obvious as the years passed.
We planted a peach tree the first year on Second Street. The next spring we raised chicks to chickens and turned our lawn into food.
“You need to cut down that tree when you leave,” my landlord said as I was moving out. “I don’t want to have to take care of it, and it’s too hard to mow around.”
Today I bought someone else’s eggs for $3.50 and ate a peach from the freezer.

It’s old. Maybe 100 years. Hell, maybe 200. The rings are rotten in the middle, so it’s hard knowin’ not countin’.
But Sheila’s house is caving in from the root system hitting her basement wall, and ours is being pushed to its foundational limits.
Half and half. That’s how they split the bill after a local group of entrepreneurs made our decaying red maple into next winter’s firewood.
It was a conundrum. The giant tree sat exactly in the center of the imaginary line dividing Sheila’s property from ours, which we rent. She wasn’t willing to let the expanding roots deform her house any longer. It had to come down. My landlord wasn’t so concerned. He questioned whether it was worth the cost considering the shape of the house and thought it would be more financially cunning to allow the tree its natural right of taking out the house. This way insurance money could be collected and a more profitable unit built.
The tree is down. There’s more sun on the back porch, and Sheila seems less concerned.