Back off, bud-dy.

I hate tree buds. I've always hated tree buds.

I recall with disgust my springtime walks to my elementary school (three blocks away) and how carefully I had to tiptoe past certain red-budded trees on my street, to avoid squishing any of the offending tree parts onto the bottom of my shoe. It was worse, I felt, stepping on a tree bud than on a post-rainstorm above-ground earthworm.

I don't know why I felt this way, or feel this way, but plants seem to be at the -- ahem -- root of many of my fears.

In my waking life, at the same time I was shuddering and loathing the tree-bud lined walk to school, I had a poem published in the local paper that began (and this is all of my poetry you will ever read) "Blossoming flowers, budding trees: Spring, spring is all of these." (I was eight or so.) By fifth grade, I had become a surly human-hater, wishing we stupid people would just leave the environment alone, already. In seventh grade, I debated the ethics of pulling up baby maple trees for five cents a tree, from my grandma's side-yard groundcover. (I earned five dollars.)

I wrote a petition in elementary school and tried to get all of my friends to sign it. I was an embarrassingly earnest child: It was written to my next-door neighbor and stated that if he tried to mow his lawn again -- there were small trees growing in some patches of his grass -- my friends and I would stop him by forming a human chain around the tree-filled area.

Providence intervened to prevent me from ever presenting this petition to our neighbor. Only two other people signed it.

Later, much later in life, despite all I had done for them, plants began figuring prominently in my nightmares. (For instance, the tomato dream, the recollection of which chills me even now.)

Maybe it's because I've never been able to keep a houseplant alive for longer than four months.