Tree

Tree

I heard the shotgun crack of the tree splinter and the cascade of boughs as it took down the smaller trees in its path, felt the solid thud as it met hard-packed earth. No amount of moss could cushion the towering plummet. It did not die a silent death, but moaned and groaned, twisted in its death dance and paid no heed to whether anyone was there to hear it or not. For just one moment the world was silent as if mute of shock, everything ceasing to take in the profundity. Inordinate stillness. Eventually the scurrying resumed, the small birds chirped and the large ones cawed, each going about their own living business. It was the tree your grandfathers grandfather planted and it had seen much. A tree whose roots encamped on the slight hillside to stay the mud from flowing to the orchard, keeping the planting lands plantable. It was a sentinel guard for the homestead a quarter mile away, just one in a row of soldiers chosen for its heartiness. It knew the secrets and traditions, the injustices and the triumphs, never once giving over to betrayal. It stood watching, each year getting taller, broader, the scope of its vision vaster, till it was royalty among bark-laden behemoths. And to what end? To lay broken, just the diagonal side of the triangle where earth meets trunk, meets bole. Forest botany giving way to rotting geometry among the moist ferns of the overgrown acreage. In time to become detritus, after the insects had devoured the fibers and left their own crispy carcasses mixed in with the loam. Yes, it was a tree, a mighty tree, a warrior whose end had come only to nourish the underbrush. And with it's passing the sun shone down brightly on parts where no light had reached for many, many years. A photoerotic process which breathed life where darkness had only dwelled. And the rain fed the spongy moss. Absurd to become such rich fertilizer for a field that no one would ever plow again. The wind howled and the rusty For Sale sign buckled.~MCM ©2014