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29 May 2023

We spent a night in Quincy, Calif., in the fall of 2009 at a bed and breakfast as the guest of some friends. Cute place above an appliance store and directly across the street from the county court house. In case you got any ideas.

Quincy in 2009 was a charming town with many old buildings, some even of stone. But there wass something about it. You couldn't tell if it was in decay or rehabilitating.

There is one distinct feature in the town, though, that we've always wanted to write about. Every now and then as you walk around you see a huge Sequoia redwood planted in someone's front yard.

Sandy, who ran the B&B, told us they were planted in memory of the 12 boys from Quincy who died in World War I. That made those trees about 95 years old then. So many more years than those of the kids whose deaths they memorialized. She said they're so big now that they're breaking up the foundations of the houses they mark.

So it goes, as one novelist* wrote of war.

Yet what a perfect memorial, we thought then. And never forgot.

They are the planet's most massive tree, growing as high as a 30-story building and as wide as two Priuses parked end-to-end. They are native to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range where Quincy was built.

The flora most associated with Memorial Day is the red poppy that inspired Colonel John McCrae to write In Flanders Fields. But this year we'd like to remember our fallen with a giant Sequoia.

We imagine they are still standing in Quincy, those 12 Sequoias. And the houses they endangered? Well, they could probably use a little remodeling after a century.

Which you can't say about a Sequoia.


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