A Bunch of Cherries

I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a non-existent tree", he writes, referring to a sapling he transplanted in his yard as a small boy. Late in life he returns to find it gone, although "for sixty years that cottonwood had been growing in my mind". From this paradox, and from his observation of brown wasps, field mice, pigeons and a group of homeless people in a railroad station, Eiseley extrapolates an attachment that humans and animals form to nonexistent places, homes that have ceased to exist.