The Tiniest of Trees

The moon arcs lower in the sky, and soon the sharp-lined, bare tree shadows will blur as buds take shape then burst into spring’s tiny versions of this year‘s leaves. When the sun rises, a brilliant blue sky spreads widely behind a forest canopy of dark lace branches, and the forest floor lights up in places where it won’t in another month or so. Spring is on the move through wet winter ground, the water table high and seeping out in unusual places. Sap rises, invisible and unstoppable, inside all those quiet trunks.

Meanwhile, I’ve been grieving the pending loss of a thousand acres of 100-year-old trees in scattered parcels, all part of a logging project that will take away a century old biotic community, fifty acres at a time, in dozens of different places inside my home watershed. I’ll step away from that to join the green pom pom celebration:  tiny white pines stretching to their two or three inch height all over the drab brown, still-wintery ground of my backyard woods. I admire these little green beings, standing sturdy on lean stems, needled heads photosynthesizing furiously, unhindered by fear of the future.

Starting as seeds released by a long-ago pine cone and now standing my finger’s height at two or three years old, they have planted themselves here, with a bit of help from the wind, water, and gravity. Take that little one I’ve photographed, its elderly relative a blurry trunk in the background. Look how she reaches up and out, all needles toward the light, regardless of the consequences. Maybe a poorly placed human foot will smite her unwittingly in her infancy. Maybe her top will snap in a windstorm when she’s only twenty or so, barely a toddler by human standards. Or maybe she’ll weather it all for more than two hundred years, stand a hundred feet tall, her diameter measured in feet instead of inches, making her own song of the wind. Maybe one day her blurry trunk will be surrounded by hundreds of tiny green pom poms.

Thank you, tiny tree, for reminding me of possibilities.

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