An Old Tree

There’s an old tree that leans ponderously southward in my postage stamp sized backyard in West Michigan.  How do I know the tree is old?  I know the tree is old because its bark is as diamond cross-hatched as the back of an old man’s neck.  The tree is properly known as an Ash Leaf Maple, but I prefer its common name Box Elder, because 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.  Like arthritis damaged hands.  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 3 A.M. event, dropped a limb, its girth two-thirds the diameter of the trunk, on my small one stall.  The limb crushed the garage like a matchstick between your fingers, and the scar is the only remaining evidence of this early morning pruning. 

Although the tree’s appearance is almost sinister, its dead limbs scratching at the sky begging for life, 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, from both its living, and, what appear to be, dead limbs and scars.  A Boston Ivy clings tenaciously twelve feet up the trunk.  Sending 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.  The Box Elder will not win any awards for beauty, but it will inspire by its audacity for life.

Posted by on 05/12 at 04:10 AM

  1. I take it your garage was empty?

    Posted by Allen Morton  on  05/12  at  01:33 PM

  2. Allen - Actually, my 82 Jeep was in the garage, along with the other detritus that normally accumulates within a garage.  Fortunately, the Jeep escaped relatively unscathed, at least if you consider being able to knock the roof back to normalcy with a heavy mallet as relatively unscathed.

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  02:43 PM

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