Unfamiliar home

My goal for the next several months is to explore my back yard. This might seem like a trivial task. I mean, how often does someone not know where they are living and what surrounds them? I, for one, don’t know. This is mostly because my fiancé and I just moved into a new house, and partially because life can keep you so busy and focused, that you don’t take the time to look around every once in a while.

So this is my new back yard. The picture is taken from where I sit on the back porch in the morning having my coffee. The yard is partially fenced in, the beams of the fence slightly weathered and slightly uneven. Behind the fence is more yard, and, as you can see from the picture, five of the seven garages that belong to the property, and now to us.

It’s odd for me to be surrounded by pines. I’ve always been in areas of Pittsburgh where deciduous trees are prevalent and pines are scarce. True, the forests of Pennsylvania are full of a variety of both deciduous and coniferous trees, but for some reason, I never associate pine trees with much else in Pennsylvania besides Christmas. When I was in Wyoming and Oregon, the pine trees out there greatly outnumbered the other types of trees, making the air smell all wrong. It didn’t smell familiar at all. It didn’t smell like home to me. Even during the summer when the sun warms the trees and the forest floors, the smell of summer – that clean, warm, humid smell – wasn’t exactly right. Not that it was bad. It just wasn’t summer-smell.

At home, though, the pine trees are a nice reminder of the time I spent out West. It’s like a little piece of the mountains were brought here for me. Of course, there are still plenty of other types of trees – oaks, maple, birch. But these pines are the first thing you notice. I wondered this morning what kind they were. There are one hundred and fifteen total species of pine trees in the world. How am I even able to begin to guess? The needles on some are the long, soft kind. The others resemble the traditional Douglas Fir with the short needles that I always hated. People usually get the Douglas Fir for their Christmas trees and the needles are uncomfortable when you put lights on them. I am not a fan.

Whatever species these pine trees are, though, they still make my own back yard seem mysterious with unfamiliarity. Even after having been here for a month, I still look out at the pines and wonder why they are here. Why instead of another type of tree were they planted in the yard? Is it something in the soil? Or maybe the previous owner just really liked pines. I’ve always been a fan of white birch trees. They seem elegant with their white-silver bark and the contrast of the yellow leaves in fall. But these pine trees make me re-think the majestic.