It will be easy to remember when she found her place in the ground. Phillipa was planted near my sewing room window on Halloween. She is a sequoia, which is a grand lineage for a sapling. The man who dug the hole brought her from California. 

Planting a tree is an act of trust. What fantasy are we entertaining when we tell each other that a trunk skinnier than my wrist will one day have bark eighteen inches thick, and might arm wrestle our hundred-year-old oak for the title of Greatest Tree? 

The planter and I will be gone by then. There is no predicting who will sit beneath Phillipa's branches on an autumn day. Probably not my grandchildren nor his. We chatted about the houses around us, the ones that offered safety to my relatives when I was the size of this tree. 

How do buildings regard us, these transients who show up at a moment's notice and think they own you? Paint your sides according to whim, and forget to offer allegiance to the walls that shelter them? Homes keep secrets well enough, and seem unperturbed by world events. Lodgings do not take offense as our arbitrary market values vacillate, as if a string of numbers can express a home's worth. 

Trees, too, are unfettered by calendars and administrations. They stretch without hurrying, stand boldly in the rain, drink long and deeply with gratitude. 

"He shall be like a tree
Planted by the rivers of water,
That brings forth its fruit in its season,
Whose leaf also shall not wither;
And whatever he does shall prosper." Psalm 1