Lady Liberty

When I was a child and my mother took me shopping, there was a small pond that we always passed on the way to the grocery store. Right in the middle of the pond, splendidly viewable from the highway we were on, was an upright log, or perhaps a tree, rising straight out of the water. At the top of the log were short branches that resembled a crown, and from around the middle of the log was a longer branch that was raised above the crown. The effect was that this log looked very similar to Lady Liberty, and every time we passed it, I would comment to my mother, with a certain amount of pleasure, “There’s the Statue of Liberty.”

Shortly after September 11, 2001, we passed the pond to discover that someone had cut the log down to a stump and stuck the U.S. flag into it.