The painting that stuck out from the hundreds that popped up on a Google image search  is a painting in a series called “A Separate Reality”. The painting in particular, shows a a grassy plain that stretches out into the distance. There is a giant cargo ship with oars coming out on both sides of the ship that seems to be sailing through solid earth, much like a plow breaks up the ground. The ship looks dirty and has a full-scale city complete with skyscrapers on top of it. Smog seems to be coming from the ship and there are other plumes of smog in the distance. There are also birds hovering around the skyscrapers and there seems to be building blocks strewn in the grass around the ship.

The painting helps me remember the months I spent in Germany when I was around 9 years old. The house we lived in was U.S. military housing so all of the houses on base looked the same. Behind the house was our backyard which was a hill whose peak was at our back door and then at the bottom of the hill was a green metal fence which surrounded the rest of the yard. Beyond the fence was another stretch of land until another, larger fence with barbed wire created the boundary of the base. This stretch of land was filled with apple trees and I still remember running around the trees with all of my friends and just picking apples off the tree. We ate all of the ones that were good to eat and we threw the ones that weren’t good to eat at each other. There was one tree, however, that stood above the rest. Thinking back on it, this tree was probably the tallest on base but it was most definitely the best tree. The tree had a treehouse up at the top of a wooden ladder nailed into it that was pretty spacious. The treehouse had no ceiling but had a really nice rug in it oddly enough. Hanging off one of the branches of the tree was a tire swing, which by itself is one of the greatest inventions in the history of man. One of the big branches of the tree was cracked in half from when a lightning bolt hit it directly and split the branch in two.

I remember that towards the end of my family’s time there, men with hard hats started showing up by the trees with clipboards more and more often. Finally, on our last day there, the men came back with machines and began cutting down the trees. All that day, all you heard was the loud running of the machines and the falling of the trees. They even cut down the big tree with the tire swing and the treehouse, leaving only stumps and memories. I’ve always wondered if the trees grew back or if we just built on top of it. I wonder if the cracks made in the earth by that ship ever close again or are they just left there?