Thursday, April 30, 2009

Those Beautiful Trees that Smell Like Poop

The title says it all, folks. I love almost everything about spring, even when the dogs get really wet and muddy from all of the rain. Ah, there is nothing better than the start of baseball, the greening of the trees overhanging the streets in Royal Oak and across Michigan, people returning to the outdoors - it's just about perfect. The singular thing that I absolutely hate about spring are those terrible, horrid, disgusting flowering white trees with blossoms that smell like a combination of turd and vomit. An almighty creator was in the midst of creating these trees on the 6th day, but then got a serious case of food poisoning and really screwed something up. People say that God is infallible, but this is the closest evidence in nature I have to a couple of mistakes here and there. I'm not insulting your faith, just these trees. From everything I can tell, they are called "bradford pear trees", but instead I call them "those trees that smell like poop and make me want to die."

These trees range from quite small to gigantic, and the bigger the tree, the bigger the dump you think someone took on your lawn. They line the streets of Ann Arbor, are incredibly prominent along most of the path of my run, and make me love life just a little bit less. The most frustrating thing about them is that they are visually pretty and they seem to be fairly robust, and I fear that their popularity is picking up steam. If only people would get close enough to smell and realize where that smell is coming from, I think that could finally be the end of the bradford pear tree. Go out for a walk, and when you think you stepped in something, you're standing near a bradford pear tree.

I am a bit hypersensitive when it comes to all of my senses - taste, touch, smell, hearing, telekinesis - and often when I am bothered by something, I am overreacting to reality. In the case of these trees, I am dead on. The smell invades your lungs and makes it hard to breathe. Similar to how I want less nuts in my trail mix, I want less of these trees on the planet.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

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Nora said...

At DePaul they line the quad and we refer to them as "the tuna fish trees." Alternatively, there's another far less polite term coined by some drunken frat boys which I'm certain you can figure out on your own.