My father is not a particularly handy man, as my mother will not hesitate to explain, and he has never been one. He fixes my closet door when the hinges malfunction, and he taught me how to change light bulbs safely and mow the lawn evenly, but not much else. My mother has been pleading with him for years to pave the driveway and he hasn’t made a move to do it. So why he took the initiative to cut down the trees that one summer, I don’t know.

We were living in a narrow townhouse at the time. My bedroom was Pepto-Bismol pink and had a white metal bunk bed that I hung curtains from and used to stage puppet shows for my sister. Ten years ago. Just over five miles from where I sit now. It was a fifteen minute drive there when we last dropped by to look at our old home.

We had two pear trees in our backyard. Stout, stubby, and vertically challenged, they weren’t much to look at. Nearly barren, too, almost literally fruitless — the few fruit they produced were rock-hard and more likely to shatter your jaw than be preserved as jam. Too short to sit under the shade of. Regardless, they gave an impressive shadowy effect during summer evening barbecues, and they provided children who’d only known apartment balconies something to boast about. Having your own fruit trees — surely that is something out of heaven! Jannah, as it’s said in Arabic.

Or not Jannah, as it turned out. After moving in, we had to wait until summer to learn that they were pear trees, that they bore the occasional fruit, and that said fruit would only be help extract loose teeth and attract honey bees and flies. For Muslims, honey is traditionally considered a blessing for Muslims — a prime example of God’s love for humans — so we tried to tolerate the bees. But the flies!

And so my mother nagged. “I could grow watermelons here,” she lamented. “Wouldn’t you rather have watermelon than these inedible pears? Wouldn’t that be better?” I despised watermelon at that age — the tale about the boy who swallowed seeds and grew a watermelon in his belly haunted me until I finished grade school — but even I agreed it would, in fact, be a better deal.

My father must have agreed. He proved his dedication to the cause by cutting the trees down less than a year after my mother’s entreaties began. I don’t know how it happened. It must have been a quick process, because they were there when I left for school and were gone by the afternoon. He must not have known what he was doing, either, because two gnarled stumps peeked out above the grass.

“Why did you cut the trees down?” I asked him.

“The fruit brought all sorts of bugs when it rotted.” He pointed to his arms. “Bug bites. The yard is full of bees and flies.”

It was true. You couldn’t walk from one side of the yard to the other without bugs tattooing your ankles. Swarms of insects. But God, he cut a fruit tree. A fruit tree. I remembered what we learned Saturdays at the mosque: even in times of war, the prophet Muhammad had instructed his followers to never cut down fruit trees, as would leave the innocent people without a means to live and support themselves.

I did hate bug bites, though. My feet and elbows were constantly swollen from traipsing barefoot in the cool grass to catch fireflies.

“Well, why did you leave the stumps?” I said, unsatisfied.

“I tried to dig them out,” he said guiltily. “And now I’m trying to pull them out with ropes. Your Ammi will be so angry when she gets back.”

Of course she’d be furious. How do you make a watermelon patch with two arthritic tree stumps in the center? We spent the weekend straining at the rope strangling the stumps. To no avail. My mother arrived and threw her fit before joining us in our struggle to shovel the stumps out.

“I wish we just left the trees there,” moaned my younger sister, scratching at her calves furiously. “I don’t even like watermelons. I hate seeds.”

My father set his shovel down to rub at the red, raised skin on the insides of his wrists. “You know, I’d rather deal with the bugs,” he admitted, defeated.

I picked up the small metal shovel they had given me to use and held it between my feet. It fell, so that the blade pointed towards the patch of brilliantly healthy, green grass surrounding the stumps — an anomaly in our yard, despite half-hearted efforts. The sunlight filtered a single pane of the air; a cloud of invisible, microscopic flies fluttering against our cheeks. An umbrella-shaped plot of Amazon green.