It is a surprisingly marvellous thing to have lived in one place long enough to notice how a tree has grown. I don't mean that I've never seen a tree be bigger than it once was, but as with humans, the radical changes you see in a tree's early years are much more noticeable than those you see in maturity.
In my mother's garden, there were plenty of these young trees - those brought and transplanted by my mother as saplings, tenderly cared for, watered, fertilized. I watched them slowly put out leaves and begin to bloom as they overcame the trauma of being uprooted and displaced into a new environment and began to interact with the nitrogen-fixing residents of their new home soil. As fruit trees, however, they were lovingly pruned each year to help them grow more fruit. Some were dwarf varietals and some were more actively shaped to remain short, in either case aiming to both avoid the power lines above and keep the fruit within reach for my mother below.
In contrast, when I moved into my urban-ish apartment on the edge of suburbia, the tips of the most eager branches greeted me from the bottom of my third floor window. This was a tree that was already twenty-some feet in height, branching out just as far in diameter. Peering past the top of the tree, I could see its fellows alternately lining the rest of the street, trees of similar size clearly planted many years ago around the same time. Even back then, this was already a mature tree, its welcome shade in the DC summer the result of someone else's foresight.
Each day when I worked from home, it provided a welcome place for my eyes to focus whenever I turned away from my screen to think. It occasionally provided drama and intrigue, as a sometimes hangout for a passel of sparrows and the occasional crow. In spring we'd often see the sparrows flying up from the tree to the corner above our window, beaks laden with twigs, and know it was time to keep a careful ear out for the peeping of stray chicks in the walls near our dryer.
This spring, I began to notice some sparrows flying higher up than before, not to our window but perhaps the one above. And with a jolt, I realized that indeed, the top of the tree was now to the fourth floor what it had been to ours, seven years ago. The tree had grown, both up and out, a dozen feet since I had been here. Where once I could see the buildings across the street all year round, now I could only see them in winter when the branches were bare. It was a few days after I first stared into the tree with this realization, appreciating the extent to which the tree had grown and become an ever greater haven for the sparrows, that I first met The Bird.