The Sun Has One Less Tree to Care For

I have to write this blog to be able to move on.  I need closure.  For a lost tree.

Alone with myself

The trees bend to caress me

The shade hugs my heart

~ Candy Polgar ~

This feels silly.  How could I become so attached to a tree as to mourn its passing?  I've spoken to some about my feelings and I'm not alone.  I feel like I've lost a pet.  I always marvel at our relationships with our pets - how, in spite of their inability to speak, we still have conversations with our pets.  It's in their body language and their rudimentary vocalizations.  I felt my tree was a part of the family just as a pet is.  I had a connection with that tree.

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees

as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion

to his respect for them.

~ James Russell Lowell ~

Part of my feelings stem from the way it became part of our lives.  It was planted as a very young tree that needed care and attention as any youth does.  It needed training as any youth does.  It needed food and water as any youth does.  But unlike people, when it became a teen is when it began to shine.

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,

We fell them down and turn them into paper,

That we may record our emptiness.

~ Kahlil Gibran ~

Eventually it grew into a beautiful mature adult that was a comfort to our family.  It provided shade in the summer, its purpose from its beginning.  It became the centerpiece of the yard.  It would become ablaze in the fall and the neighbors would take notice.  Cowbirds would perform their melodious mating rituals in its branches:  

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

~ Joyce Kilmer, 1914 ~

When I walk past its stump now I can't help but feel something missing.  Something that used to apparently give me a feeling of security and companionship.  

I miss my tree...