I call her The Mother Tree. She dominates the south hill, rising from near its crest, her graceful branches spread wide, as if in welcome.
I’ve watched her swell with pink buds in the springtime that evolve into summer’s green leaves. In autumn, she wears red as only a maple can do. And now, in winter, she dances naked in the wind and embraces the falling snow.
She’s twice as old as I am, and maybe half again more.
A hundred years ago, a road that stretched between New York and Chicago passed beneath her limbs. Travelers would stop to rest and perhaps to spend the night in the house just down the hill from her, the one where I live now. She’s seen the miners dig coal right over there to the west, and clear fields in the valley to the north, turning them into farmland. She’s watched the lives of all the woodland’s creatures, and of the humans who passed by or stopped to make their homes here .
I figure she knows a thing or two. So when I’m troubled and want to scream to the world about the errors of its ways, about all its injustices and wrongs, I open the back door and gaze at her for a while. And she tells me to be at peace, that it is the wind’s task to bluster, and the creek’s role to roar, and that some of us are meant simply to stand, and watch, and let go. Your gifts will bud and spread and fall, all of their own accord. And your essence will sing through your being.