Return of the Treelet Report

The sweetgum tree-to-be in the back yard of the palatial Surlywood estate, rising from the remains of a tree that blew over in one of those legendary Oklahoma storms, survived the winter quite nicely, thank you very much, and while it hasn't added a whole lot of height, it's built up quite an infrastructure in its eleven months of life; certainly it's doing better than the grass that has still failed to grow back in the area directly beneath its predecessor. (Said predecessor was more or less centered in that ungrassed circle, the base of its trunk taking up approximately three-quarters of the area.) Unofficially, it's a shade (sorry) over twenty-seven inches tall, which means it's growing slower than bamboo but faster than the national debt. The tree obviously is a long way from being mature, but then again, people have said that about me, and I've been around for a whole lot longer than eleven months. Regular readers will remember that I took the loss very badly when it happened — residual treehugger instincts, I suppose — so I consider the rebirth, as it were, something to celebrate in a small way, especially since my new mowing regime puts the blades well above those damned spiky balls emitted by that second sweetgum five feet to the east.