My great-great-grandfather, Simon, planted that giant sequoia in our yard not long after he came to America. According to family stories, he didn’t have much, just a small patch of land and a stubborn belief that if he put something down deep enough, it would last. That tree became proof of that.
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Every generation in my family had a photo taken standing in front of the sequoia. Weddings, birthdays, random Sunday afternoons — someone always ended up posing against that trunk. To our family, it wasn’t just a tree.
It was a symbol and a reminder that no matter what hardships life threw at us, we’d endure. While it was history for us, to my neighbor Roger, it was apparently a personal inconvenience. For the past few years, he’d made that very clear.
Judging by Roger’s complaints, the tree was driving him crazy. “Your sequoia roots are spreading into my yard.”
