Friday, September 15, 2006

An Old Tree

I’m heading to the woods, today, with some “dangerous” characters.  My trusty sidearm, and an old, but reliable, over and under.

Here’s a bit of prose on an old tree.

I know of an old tree, it leans ponderously southward in a postage stamp sized backyard in West Michigan.  How do I know the tree is old?  I know it is old because the tree’s bark is all diamond cross-hatched, similar to an old man’s neck you might observe as you sat in a pew at church as a kid.  The tree is properly known as an Ash Leaf Maple, but I prefer its common name, Box Elder.  My preference stems from the fact that they actually did make boxes, and cheap furniture, from the trees in the past.

Box Elders are what I would call junk trees, and this one is no exception.  The tree itself is bent, gnarled, and scarred.  Almost arthritic looking.  The tree’s most prominent scar, a gift of nature’s capricious pruning, is a jagged, gaping tear six feet long and two feet wide.  The pruning, a dark of night event, dropped a limb, its girth two-thirds the diameter of the trunk, on a small one stall.  The limb crushed the garage like a matchstick between your fingers, and this scar is the only remaining evidence of the event.  The tree’s dead limbs, emaciated and weather worn, scratch at the sky, begging for life, and litter those still living.

Though the tree’s appearance is almost sinister, deathly, like trees in old black and white horror films, it has not yielded to death.  Suckers, sprouting like hairs from an old man’s ears, proclaim its vitality.  This new life clamors from both its living, and what appear to be, dead limbs and scars.  A Boston Ivy clings tenaciously twelve feet up the trunk.  The vine sends it roots running like veins to the earth, sucking life to its aerie home.  The Boston Ivy is not the tree’s only tenant.  A gray fox squirrel and her brood also call the tree home.  Woodpeckers, nuthatches and other feathered creatures also flitter through daily.  Free meals are often pried from the tree’s living, and dead limbs.

The tree’s unkempt appearance belies its venerability.  Its scars and lifeless limbs are mocked by the vitality of life springing from it.  This is evidenced by not only the tree’s new growth, but by those creatures living within it, and those taking sustenance from it.  The Box Elder will not win any awards for beauty, but it will inspire by its audacity for life.

Posted by John Venlet on 09/15 at 03:11 AM
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I Still Wouldn't Vote for Him

Here’s a recent headline about Kinky Friedman:  Friedman Says He’d Legalize Pot in Texas

Kinky is a colorful character, and all, but in politics, characters of one sort or another are a dime a dozen.

Posted by John Venlet on 09/15 at 03:02 AM
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