“We have a very large tulip tree in our woods, down in the gully behind the farm.”

One of my favorite memories that I love doing every year, and this was more so as an adult, was going with my father, we have a very large tulip tree in our woods, down in the gully behind the farm. And we would jump on the four wheeler, and go back in the woods to check the tulip tree to see if it was blooming. And riding with him on the four wheeler and spending the time admiring this tree, it’s I don’t know, I keep — I should probably try to find out, I think it may be one of the tallest tulip trees in the state of Michigan. It’s on a slope, so it’s kind of hard to tell how tall it actually is. And it’s surrounded by other trees. It’s quite a steep slope actually, but I guess I should get some geometry going maybe and try to figure out how tall it is. But we would go down there and try to — I remember one year picking some of the flowers off and I brought them back to Minnesota with me. I was flying and we had wrapped them up in a tissue and a plastic bag to keep the stems or the branches wet and I had them in my backpack and I carried it on the plane. And so many people commented on the beautiful flowers and asked me what they were and I’m like, “well, they’re not — they’re flowers, but they belong to a tree” and they could not believe they weren’t an actual flower. And I guess the fact that it was just, y’know, going back there with my father and that was something that we would do together in the early spring. I think they bloom in early May, that we would get to have that to look forward to and do when I would be home in Michigan.