The instant I’d finished, I heard a ga-Zump!
I looked.
I saw something pop out of the stump
of the tree I’d chopped down. It was sort of a man.
Describe him? That’s hard. I don’t know if I can.– Dr. Seuss
I started working on my Lorax mural today.
I’m really excited about it, because I’ve always loved The Lorax. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted the story to be real. I think I was too embarrassed to explain this to my parents, but my childhood habit of picking up snail shells was part of an effort to acquire “fifteen cents and a nail and the shell of a great-great-great grandfather snail,” my incessant attempts to grow trees from acorns and maple seeds were practice for the unlikely possibility that some mysterious green-gloved Deep Throat might someday decide to trust me with the Very Last Truffula Seed of Them All, and my constant requests for Mom and Dad to take me for walks near the west edge of town were actually reconnaissance missions to find the Street of the Lifted Lorax.
If such a street existed, I was sure it would be on the west edge of town, partly because there was a rather depressing industrial area out there, with some suspiciously Gricklish-looking weeds around it, but mostly because we lived west of Park Avenue — which I wasn’t allowed to cross by myself — and I just couldn’t entertain the heartbreaking possibility that the Very Last Truffula Seed of Them All might be out of reach. (In point of fact, I wasn’t allowed to go visit creepy hermits in deserted brownfields on “special dank midnights in August,” either, but somehow I felt that my parents would forgive that indiscretion more readily than they would forgive a solo trip across the busiest street in town.)
I never believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, but I wanted very much to believe in Truffula trees … and I wanted that seed more than anything.
As it turns out, Truffulas don’t grow from seed. They grow from bulbs. And you don’t even have to track down the shell of a great-great-great grandfather snail to buy them. You just have to shell out $13.50 plus shipping for 50 of ‘em. They’ll be cute in the middle of the UNLESS circle in front of the mural, don’t you think? 
Emily
