# Peace: big elm, house

*The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 19 Jul 2001*

<https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2733>

> Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright
> in each message remains with the person who wrote it.
> Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original
> archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than
> retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.

---

### Roy C. Lackey
*19 Jul 2001, 23:22*

Rostrum asks:

> Does Weer say that the tree was mature?  Maybe it was a sapling that fell.
> I don't like that idea.  The language implies a full-sized tree.  If it
> were a sapling one would be more likely to say it got smashed or uprooted
> by the storm.

The second sentence of the book indicates it was mature: "from the number of
shattered limbs and the size of the trunk there must have been a terrible
crashing." And on page 45 he thought he might "climb into the branches".

> I just figured that Weer knows who planted the tree because it was over
> his grave, not because he was hovering around as a ghost and watched her
> plant it, but that he just has that knowledge because of its connection
> to him.   Weer, like the reader on her first time through the novel,
> hasn't thought through the implications and realized what it means.

And where was his grave? Outside the window of a brick-and-mortar house, or
in some more common necropolis?

> Dan'l wrote:
> I think the simplest answer (though not one I'm prepared to argue
> strongly for) is that Weer built _a_ house, and that the "memory
> mansion" bears some strong resemblance to the house he built, for
> reasons which might be obvious.

Very likely, and I don't think that we'll ever get a better answer.

-Roy

---
