Helicopter

Dale mentions Tree of Heaven, and I am instantly transported to my backyard as a kid, the smell that gets in my mouth. There was another tree in the back yard, that died, my parents spent a week cutting it down and getting it out - which was exciting and sad at the same time. More sad, they never planted another. The stump, and the area around it, never grew grass properly. It may have been a horse chestnut, but I was very small when it died, and I don't remember.

The Tree of Heaven, despite my mother's love of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (which she told me was that kind of tree, that grows in sidewalk cracks) could not be killed, and she really tried. She heard that a copper plug would kill it, and surreptitiously hammered one in. Didn't phase the organism at all, apparently. Although it grew into our fence, it was rooted in the neighbor's yard, and for whatever reasons, a series of neighbors never cut it out. Eventually wound up with a neighbor who hacked it down, and the seedlings proliferated in the blighted area.

I was fascinated by the story that it wasn't a tree, but a shrub of some sort, a weed in practice. I had a soft spot for weeds, since no one liked them, and I found clover and dandelions attractive. Even I had to admit the Tree of Heaven stank and littered, and spread. Dropped nasty wormy things.

The front yard had a lovely old maple, though. I loved the spinning seeds, played with them often, throwing them up in fistfuls, gloried in them spiraling down. It's roots lifted the sidewalk, and leaves shaded the place. I hope it is still there, dropping helicopter seeds.