by Cindi Clarke

Created on: May 25, 2009

This old tree talks to me.

I see it in the mornings when I arrive at work, standing large and imposing in the field that has been cut bare around it, as if it is the sentry left to guard the forest behind it. It stands perhaps three stories tall, and almost as wide. If I were to try to wrap my arms around it, I might reach only a third of the girth alone.

Some mornings it is shrouded in fog, as if wrapped in a blanket that was created before man walked the earth. Other mornings the bright rays of the rising sun seem to dance in its topmost branches and leaves, making it look as if it is on fire.

As I parked my car this morning I stopped and looked over at it and wondered what it has seen in the decades since it was first just a small seedling.

It was fortunate to survive the deer that could have grazed on its tender leaves and the weeds and sprouts near it. As it grew, it probably fought for sunlight in the surrounding forest against the tall pines that reached to the sky and the palmettos whose fronds fanned out to shade anything smaller beneath them. Storms would have come, hurricanes, with their winds blowing fierce, yet now it stands tall and strong. Defiant. Not bend or deformed from the fury of the wind as some trees can be.

I wonder about the native Indians that might have taken shelter under its branches, before the white man came and "civilized" the land. Maybe children who climbed up into its branches to hide or hunt. The hundreds of generations of wildlife that have lived in its branches.

This old tree saw the forest around it cut down and plundered for wood, yet for some reason it was spared. It has seen buildings go up, and men come to learn how to fly airplanes that would take them off to war. It has heard Taps being played as some of those men came home again, in pine boxes perhaps from the forests nearby.

I look up into the branches of this magnificent life force as it stretches to the sky and wonder what it might think of the things it has seen and heard as it has grown. How much pain it felt as the trees surrounding it were cut down, and whether or not it felt fear as the men approached near it. I wonder if it feels isolated and alone in the field by itself, or if the wind carries the thoughts of those in the woods nearby to comfort it. It has been able to grow as large as it has simply because it has been without trees to crowd it, but I wonder if it would have rather been a smaller tree to have enjoyed the company and support of the forest.

Do we strive too much to isolate ourselves, to "branch out" on our own and leave the forest and go where we can "put down roots?" We may be successful in growing and stretching towards the sky, but when the strongest of winds come is it not more comforting and secure to feel the forest of our friends and family around us? Supporting us by intertwining roots to hold us in place when the storms threaten to uproot us? Perhaps there is a reason we cannot "see the forest for the trees." The forest works together for the benefit of all, not just the one.

I walked to see this old tree today, and put my hand to the trunk, listening for it to share its history with me. The wind blew and the branches and leaves rustled its secrets. I thanked it for its beauty, and for its survival as a testament to time.

Old tree... I hope you outlive me.

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