Palm Trees

When I was a little girl, I believed that palm trees were the true markers of an exotic and tropical locale. I remember the first time I ever saw a palm tree - when I went on a beach trip to South Carolina with some of my friends senior year of highschool. When we arrived at our destination, and I noticed the palm trees, I knew for certain that I had was about to embark upon the greatest vacation of my life. I had finally made the big time: I was at a beach with Palm Trees!

I continued to believe that Palm Trees were beautiful and exotic and wonderful until moved to California... into a house surrounded on every side by Palm Trees. I've never actually taken the time to count them, but I would guess that I have at least 15 palm trees on my property. I thought it was the most incredible thing to own my very own Palm Trees, to have them in my very own back yard.

And then a couple of months went by. And I started to realize slowly, but surely, that palm trees are not all that my childhood self had dreamed them to be.

Palm trees are DIRTY. The palms on the palm trees are constantly dying... and falling all over my property. They are thick, and heavy, and DIRTY. Yesterday, for example, Mike and I were trimming the dead palms and when we were finished we found our patio and ourseles entirely covered in brown something or other that had come off the dead palms. Gross.

Did I mention I have a pool? Yeah.. I have a pool... and I am forever skimming the Palm tree guck out of it. I am not a happy camper.

Then, there are the flowers. Some varieties of palm trees breed these teeny tiny flowers... that incessantly blow into my pool all summer long. I hate those little tiny flowers.

I hate palm trees.

Oh, how disillusioned I have become.

The only saving grace to all of this is that I have palm trees in California and NOT Texas or Florida where it is very humid. Because, I lived in both Texas and Florida, and it was a very well known fact that the people who had palm trees in their yards also had major cochroach problems. We're not talking the half inch cochroaches from the East Coast. We're talking cochroaches the size of a small rat. Disgusting, right?

Right.

The moral to this story is do not be fooled by Palm Trees. They are not exotic. They are not beautiful. They are dirty and annoying, and mark my words, I will never own another house with palm trees again.