She went back inside. I picked up another handful, but this time I examined them closely. There was a hard, oval shaped pod with a delicate wing attached to one end. I glanced to be sure the neighbor wasn’t looking and ran back to my yard with the stash of seeds. I kneeled down in front of my mother’s flower bed, and carefully poked a row of holes a few inches apart into the soil with my index finger. I pushed a seed, wing up, into each hole, and filled them back with soil.
I checked the garden every day for several weeks, but nothing happened. I had almost forgotten about my experiment when I heard my mom grumbling about all of the weeds that had sprouted where she was trying to plant flowers. I ran to find a neat row of identical seedlings, whose leaves looked suspiciously like those on the neighbor’s tree. And that was when the seeds for my career in forestry were planted!