I can divide my childhood into two parts.

I call the first part BD for Before Diagnosis and the second part AD for After Diagnosis.

It wasn’t my diagnosis. It was my dad’s.

My dad grew up in North Texas. My mom grew up in South Texas. After my parents married, they moved to California, lived there for a few years, then returned to Texas. My brother, sister, and I were later born, and my family settled down in East Texas.

This was the BD era.

I loved our Texas home. We lived on a couple of acres. The front yard was a large green lawn that tapered off into a wooded area by the road. My siblings and I simply called it “The Woods”.

The backyard was not as green as the front yard, and I don’t recall any trees there. We called the backyard “The Meadow”. I remember playing catch there, flying kites, and trying to avoid dragonflies and grasshoppers.

On one side of the house was a field of tall grasses and cattails. We called it “The Field”. I recall playing hide-and-seek in the grass, as well as sneaking through it to see what our neighbor was up to.

Even though the names for the sections of our yard were rather mundane, my siblings and I were creative, imaginative kids. We all loved to read and make up stories. We often crafted stories about The Woods.

They weren’t scary stories. My siblings and I would become various mythical or whimsical characters, and in one scenario I got to be the king. This was extraordinary considering I was the youngest.

There were tall oak and elm trees in The Woods. Most were too tall to climb. There were at least three trees we could climb, and each of us picked one as our own. I’ll admit I climbed my sister’s tree when she wasn’t around. My brother’s tree was too big.

I particularly remember The Woods in autumn. Orange, red, and yellow leaves crackled beneath our feet. Some leaves held caterpillar cocoons. I avoided those leaves because I didn’t like insects or even insects-to-be.

The tallest tree on our property was set aside just a little bit from The Woods. I honestly don’t recall what kind of tree it was, but it was big, especially to my six-year-old eyes. We called it “The Big Tree”.

One morning after a thunderstorm, we were eating breakfast when my dad announced that The Big Tree had been hit by lightning the night before. I guess I must have surprisingly slept through the event.

My siblings and I were anxious to see what had happened. As soon as we finished breakfast, we ran down the front lawn to The Woods to see what had happened.

I stood at the foot of the massive tree. There was a charred line of missing bark that went down almost the entire length of the tree. The lightning line. My dad told us that the tree would have to be chopped down. Otherwise, it would fall at some point, which would be very unsafe.

I was shocked, no pun intended. The Big Tree was going to have to come down? I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. This did not seem fair.

A few days later, a group of men came to cut down the tree. They took the trunk and all the limbs away. We didn’t have a fireplace and didn’t need wood. All that was left of The Big Tree was a stump.

Of course, all of us kids wanted to stand on the stump. I was too little to get on top of it, so my brother gave me a boost. I remember studying the many rings of the stump and wondering how old the tree was.

My parents told us not to climb up onto the stump anymore. We treated the stump with reverence, the remnant of something that was once mighty. The stump was like a grave marker, and it demanded respect.

It wasn’t long after lightning hit the tree that our family was struck by a different type of lightning. Something more imperceptible, yet ultimately as destructive.

It was suspected that my father had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

ALS is a terminal, debilitating disease. Victims are typically given two to five years to live once diagnosed. I believe the expected lifespan at that time was even less.

No one knows the exact cause of ALS, and there is no cure. It is a disease of the upper motor neurons in the brain, which tell the muscles what to do. ALS can manifest in different ways depending on which nerves are affected.

Some victims can lose their ability to swallow, talk, and ultimately breathe. Most people lose the ability to walk. As their muscles die and atrophy, their senses and cognitive functions remain intact. People with ALS live with sharp minds inside broken bodies.

Besides possible ALS, my dad had a lot of unrelated environmental allergies. The humid East Texas climate was becoming more and more intolerable for him.

My parents decided we would move to Arizona, as a dry climate would be more hospitable for my dad. Besides, my dad had always loved the West and spent years in Arizona teaching on a reservation before he met my mom.

My siblings and I had to leave The Woods, The Meadow, the Field, and the stump of The Big Tree behind.

I remember saying goodbye to the stump the day before we drove away in the moving van.

I was big enough now to climb on top of it by myself. Surely the tree wouldn’t mind if its human friend sat down on it for a little while. I traced the rings on the stump, telling the tree I was sorry that we had to leave. I apologized to it for cutting it down.

The stump bore the lightning scar from the wound received from Mother Nature a few years prior. I hoped the tree didn’t hurt anymore. I hoped it forgave us.

Before sunrise the next morning, the moving truck was pulling out of the driveway. My dad was driving, and I was in the passenger seat. My legs didn’t touch the cab floor, and I was holding my favorite doll. My siblings and mom were in the car behind us. I didn’t want to exchange The Woods, The Meadow, or The Field for the Arizona desert.

My dad was diagnosed with ALS not long after we moved to Arizona. The AD era had begun.

ALS can progress rapidly or slowly. In the case of my father, the disease moved in slowly. My father lost more strength and function as the months went by. He had difficulty walking and maintaining his balance. He lost dexterity in his hands. His speech became slurred.

He was being cut down like a tree, limb by limb, but his roots were strong, and he survived long past expectations.

I never saw our Texas home again. It’s been so long that I don’t think I could find my way back there. I wonder if that tree stump is still there. Perhaps it is now engulfed by the growth of The Woods. Perhaps the new property owners removed it.

The stump reminds me of a transition in my life and saying goodbye to a home that was now just a memory.

I would like to think a little girl now sits on it and wonders what happened to the tree. Why did it get cut down? Who had climbed up on this stump before? Did someone ever try to count the rings?

Maybe she will make up some whimsical story about how the stump came to be. Maybe she will find a better name for The Woods.

Thank you, Manmeet Singh Bhatia, for this challenge!

This story is part of “The Unseen Geography of Home — A Writing Challenge” hosted by Write Your World. We invite writers to explore the quiet, familiar spaces that shape their lives: the corners, streets, and rooms we stop noticing, but never really leave. Your world is smaller than you think — and deeper than it looks.

The Unseen Geography of Home — A Writing Challenge

The Unseen Geography of Home was originally published in Write Your World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.