You Old Tree

Scott Whitby, 2023

You old tree, you finally fell.  You had been dropping limbs and branches for years, dead and didn't know it as some say.  We cut you up and drug your parts into a pile to burn.  No more joy for you to give.  173 rings across your trunk, 173 years old in 1975.

What a tree you were though.  And what a life.  Before you were the best shade tree and before you were ever climbed by my brothers and me or your limbs held a tire swing, you had a life.

Thomas Jefferson was the US president when you sprouted from an acorn...an acorn that may well have fallen from a tree that was here before America was America.  You would have heard cannon fire from the Civil War, saw slaves freed, heard the blues become rock and roll, and would have survived storms and droughts and floods.  You held the nests of generation after generation of songbirds, squirrels, and at least one clutch of owls.

Every year without fail your buds would become leaves, bloom with pollen, make acorns and shade, turn from green to red to brown to bare and then you'd stand strong against the winter just to do it again, and again, 173 times in all.

Who knows if we were the only ones who climbed and swung and sat in your shade...or if we were just the last?

You've been gone a long time but I remember you, even almost 50 years later.  I wish we'd made a table or a mantel of you instead. 

You deserved more.