Yesterday, I completed the removal of the old, dead cactus from the yard I grew up in. The trunk, measuring about a foot and a half wide, was all dead - all the way through. I let the embers of a small fire do the majority of the work and kicked it over yesterday; it was close to the fence and was an eyesore. Plus, it bothered me that I never finished it - I had worried the cactus over the last year, pulling down the dead parts of it piece by piece and then working my way down the stump with axe and cutlass.

It was such a good place to relieve stress. I suppose I'll have to dust off the heavy bag downstairs again.

But what I had found months ago were two young plants of the same cactus. One I gave to a neighbor. One I planted in the center of the area where the elder cactus was too close to the fence, and it stands almost 3 feet tall today. I expect that over the years, long after I leave here, it will grow into a great cactus as its parent once was - and less hindered by the fence and surrounding walls. It will dominate that corner of the yard. That, somehow, is important to me.

When I was growing up, the cactus was my marker for where I was supposed to get to as I walked up the hill - always pushing myself as fast as possible. When at home, it was in the part of the yard furthest from the house - where I could sit and read novels away from the noise of the printing press. The harsh hammering of the numbering machines doing receipt books. The sound of my stepmother's walking; she never did learn to pick up her feet and stomped almost petulantly to compete with the printing press that kept food coming into the house - and her typing and slamming of doors. This was my area of solace. The area was overgrown with bougainvillea, but over the course of one week I cleared that out with a camp axe I sharpened just for the occasion. I would sit there for as long as I could and read, away from all the noise, as long as I could. It was never long enough. The stepmother calling, or something needing to be done in the printery. Stolen moments from a misplaced childhood, a young adulthood of running a business while attending high school and working out where the next meal would come from.

That cactus was part of that era. But a young cactus replaces it now, to not be any of the things the old cactus was. To be less restricted by the walls around it. To grow as tall as it can, to hold its place in the earth and to be a landmark of different things. I probably won't be around to see it, but I may visit it from time to time. In its own way, the old cactus was as close of a friend as I had growing up, and it is probably unremarkable that in some ways I think of myself as a cactus.

And then I received an email from a very close friend this morning who described to me a house she had seen in her travels, just yesterday, where a house had been built around a cactus (or so it seemed), where the cactus rose above the roof of the house at the center. And this lead me to wonder what sort of person would design something like that, to incorporate a living thing in such a manner. I would like to see that house someday. It takes a certain type of mindset to do that sort of thing, to combine what is around without taking away from it... enhancing it even by contrast.

That is art. And it is also good engineering. A rare nexus.