Every year that goes by I grow more and more thankful for all of the critters, young and old, who have shared part of their lives with me (let's just say that if you were to peek inside at my rings, which I really hope that you won't, you would find over 200 of them).
It does pain me to carry the wood of my fallen friends within my limbs, but I feel I do an honorable thing for them. Their wood is safe here in my arms, and can be appreciated almost as much in death as it should have been in life. After all, I can't change what has been done, I can only pay my respects to those that we have lost. It seems a noble cause. All of the wood up here has been reconstructed from other items, it's wonderful not to see it end up on fire or in a landfill somewhere.
This isn't how I always looked, though. It was only about 100 years ago that my branches were empty. It feels so long ago, but I remember it vividly. I was a supple teenager myself, and a lonely one at that. I had neighbors, but I resented them. I wanted to be more than myself, more than any of them. Sure taught me a lesson, because within a few years, most of them had be cut down. We became more and more scarce as the homes began to rise on our graves. It was a very scary time and place to be a tree. I still don't know what I did to spare getting the chopping block myself--I just happened to grow on the right land at the right time, I guess. I was bitter. Bitter and truly alone for quite some time. Sure, I had the random squirrel and bird visit, but I hardly produced any leaves that year, I was too traumatized. I didn't look very welcoming, which only perpetuated my sorrow.
Then one year, the family who lived closest to me had a baby boy. His parents tied up a swing on my arm, and they were my first steady set of visitors. The three of them came out to see me almost every day. Being a baby boy, however, the mere swing was not enough to keep him occupied for long. One fateful spring day his father carried up a pile of timber and left it under my shade. It turned my stomach over, seeing these seemingly discarded boards. Where they friends of mine? Relatives? Children? There's no way to ever really know. Was this an omen? Had I escaped the great tree massacre years before only to come crashing down now?
The next few days were among the most traumatic I've ever been through, and were very puzzling to me at first. The boy and his father spent hours constructing a rather primitive version of what you see today. It was really nothing more than a platform and some rails, but it seemed to excite the boy. It hurt, it hurt me every day, but it was like I knew it was not without reason. Listening to the boy tell his father about all the things he wanted to do up in his house, all the friends he wanted to show, the clubs he wanted to start, the picnics he wanted to have. It all became clear to me. My place in this world became clear to me.
Years went by, and dozens of kids had spent time enjoying my shade, my privacy, and my comfort. I can't believe that my platform lasted so long without a problem, truthfully. But one summer day, after one of the harshest winters I'd ever gone through, a little girl leaned against one of the rails and it broke. I wanted to catch her so badly, but I was helpless. Several parents called for my house to be taken down, and for a while, it looked like my guests were going to leave me forever. But then I had the strangest deja vu--one morning the same pile of lumber appeared. I knew I was in for a rough couple of days, but I trusted that these new families had a plan for me. It felt like the whole town was there to help rebuild what several generations of children had worn down. It brought sap to my leaves, I felt like such a treasure. I didn't realize I was so important to the children as they were to me.
The hundreds of kids who have spent summers lounging in my house have all found a part of themselves, and I cherish that I got to be a part of that. None of them realized how special each and every one of them have been to me (except for that little brat who tried to turn my sap into syrup, he was nothing short of a terror). After all of these years, I have seen so much more than I ever could have dreamed of without my house. I've seen romance bud right along with my flowers, I've seen heartache, I've seen true imagination, I've seen triumph. I feel like I've seen the whole world, even though I've never left this soil.
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