It's more sapling than a tree, but it seems to have gone through more than its share of the travails of life. Now it is on its last legs. It's bark is crumbling to sawdust, the wounds on its main trunk bleed golden sap. My daily walks take me past this poor, slowly-dying, tree stoically standing by the roadside.

It's desperate condition attracts insect life. From its decaying trunk there juts out the shell of some large larva that has escaped into a beetle, but I have no idea what it was. The ooozing crystal sap attracts millepedes, flies, wood borers, wasps, spiders, ants.

What makes this particular tree somewhat different from all the others loitering along my walk is the unusual insect life I chance upon that I have not found anywhere else in the neighborhood. One candy colored wasp sports on its tail a very long needle like appendage, and I mean VERY long! One weird stink bug looks exactly like the bark in texture and color. One orange wasp, dances about the trunk, its black and white wings swinging up and down. All seem to favor this particular scarred tree. When I pause to peer, I enter a different planet right by the wayside of whizzing cars and busses.