Trees

I promised in an earlier post to write about trees; however, I’m known to get distracted quite easily.   A few suggest that I may have the makings of a good writer. However, I feel that I’m too illiterate and undisciplined in controlling my thoughts in a finite straight line with an end to the ball of twine to do that.  I occasionally try to abscond a bit of genius wordsmithing from the great classics like Theroux, Cooper, and Steinbeck but fail miserably, as you can see.  Yes, when I was in High School in the late 60’s early 70’s, we were forced to read all of these, and only 50 years later did I appreciate the genius and sometimes eccentricity of the great writers. During that period, I was more focused on Paula’s breast line when she stood up to give a short treatise on a description by Cooper on a chapter-long description of a rose petal than the subject material. However, I and my fellow illiterate hooligans, for a rare moment, were focused on the front of the room instead of special ops aiming a well-placed spit wad in Allen’s ear two desks over. We trudged through the classics with a respectable C-minus average and were promoted to the 11^th grade.  And I also moved on to the University of Florida and barely got through my Business letter writing class. Not exactly a resume of a fine writer. My redeeming quality (if there is one) is that I write bluntly and with total honesty, well most of the time, and from the heart.

 Well, at last I return to the subject of my writing today, “trees.” As I sit out on my front porch pondering the beautiful Oaks, I am amazed at how beautiful and majestic they are. They seek the sun and grow steadfastly higher and fuller over the years. These were plucked from the ground and “saved” from destruction due to the construction of humanity’s much-needed Walgreens.  We pulled them out of the ground and not too gently loaded them up in a dump truck and not gracefully dumped them in my front yard 15 years ago, dug some holes and stuck them in the ground, watered them. God grew them into 40-foot tall, beautiful trees home to squirrels, the 23 types of birds enjoying the branches and providing much-appreciated shade for picnickers at our 4^th of July celebration.

The small forest of pines behind our house along the pond started from saplings to 50-foot sentinels guarding our backyard against the street noises of the neighborhood and distant interstate. I saw them grow after they survived a forest fire—a now huge Ear Tree (considered a nuisance tree by purist landscapers). The trunk is 6 feet across shades a 50-foot area and is nearly 60 feet tall. It, too, was saved 40 years ago (a fast grower) by my son while mowing the lawn either by divine intervention or his compassion (I suspect both). You can marvel at the power of nature’s resilience, or you can metaphorically think deeper like I did this morning and relate those trees to all of us seeking and growing toward the sun for sustenance. I guess if you are a Christian, you may want to substitute the spelling of the sun to The “Son,” for we like the trees seek the heavens like those trees and then get uprooted by a storm, die from disease wood borers, or just uprooted by man. Their roots upend roads and slabs, but because of their tenacity to overpower the puny things of man. And through it all, we keep overcoming and grow ever closer to the sun/son. God plants children. I planted seedlings 50 years ago obtained free from the forestry service to reclaim the banks on one of our mining projects that are now 50feet tall. The trees, like all of us, die. They/we leave behind memories/God plants more seeds that somehow grow again. Maybe our trees will finally grow tall enough where God lets us touch the heavens, and we won’t get destroyed by disease or storms and return to the Garden of Eden from whence we came. Many times, without the pruning and fertilizer, especially the organic kind from not so pleasant origins that some pastors and self-proclaimed philosophers feed us when all we need is that simple, pure warmth of the sun/son beckoning us to grow ever closer to HIM. Well, that’s about all the depth I can muster right now.  Next time, if I don’t get sidetracked, I want to revert to my sometimes earthy and true-life experiences in the sometimes-comical treatise of biological birth and animal farm life and at least one human birth.  God be with you all and keep growing.  Maybe I’ll rag on the religion in between.