Tree Stories High

Trees tell stories. Every morning, rain or shine, you will find me on my deck with a mug of honey coffee in hand, staring at my "sentinels". The sentinels are seven very tall cedar trees, not on my property, but on the one adjacent. One of the great trees is the grandfather and he is the highest. Within his huge fronds, since the last wind storm, I see that long ago, his trunk split and left him with three stout arms that continued to become taller and taller as the decades went by. I can see a space there, and it's where, in my deckdreams, I build a tree house, a place in my mind,  I can go to find peace and see the ocean below. The other sentinels are younger and learning as they lean with the sea winds and snows if we get some, and tolerate man who comes and cuts off their lower limbs because they hinder the lawn mowers. When there are high winds, the sentinels protect each other and think how foolish man is to "thin" trees that need to  hold each other up, and then man wonders why they fall. Their roots are shallow and reach far around but not deeply. When I sit on my deck sipping strong coffee, they don't see me, but I watch them and learn every day. Some days, they shine in the sun. On dull days, they sigh. Their sighing doesn't make a sound, it is seen only in the movement of their needles, as breezes wander. The tightly woven fronds wave up and down gently as together, their branches of meshed needles say hello and good-bye to the invisible air passing. This is the sigh of the cedars. When there is a storm, it whips the branches and their small cones and old used, dry twigs snap off and fly. They make crow nests one day. Their tree dance is not angry, but a chorus of sound and fury, exciting and telling a story of nature's controlled violence that is, and needs to be. If you have seen a tree enveloped by fire in a forest, it blasts into a terrible flame, the same dance but it changes the great growth and it doesn't come back the same. Until later. Fires are something a tree knows of. Some throw cones or re-live or stands and fall to feed the earth and what is to come. Trees understand. But my sentinels have friends. A little further away there are two fir trees, a different but welcome breed to them, as all trees, and these are what I call the scouts. They see a different angle of my sea side town. Their needles are spiked and shiny, their cones fat and full. There were three scouts once, but no more. Someone built a concrete tower much like the others rising into the sky here, but not as beautiful and living as the trees. The one gone was cut down. The fir scouts are taller than the sentinels and they remember that they are trees of wood. Their brother was sawn and sold for lumber. The trees tell me it's okay, because that means the tree doesn't die but only changes. It makes an even closer relationship with Man as his shelter called a house or furniture or warmth. Trees bear no hatred or envy or scorn. They can't, though they are alive like us. They simply grow and accept. They are without curiosity or ambition. Today, the sentinels told me a short story about youth. The end two sentinels are young and reaching up and up, not thick and secure as the chief sentinel, but slim and flexing in the winds and making a happy dance to welcome birds who want to find a perch where they can look all around and check out where to find the best people garbage where today they can feast. Birds use thin, young sentinels to scope out their enemies: rivals, small hawks or large eagles or perhaps to dance and  charm one of their own in a song or pretty furling of wings and tail. But the eldest cedar standing silently by, shows, not tells, that to grow old and stay tall, you need the protection of your own branches to fend off the rare but possible storms whose imposed dances, whip you around and around until you cannot stop the snap of the center of your being, and your stem breaks you to be, not one, but two forks or more to the sky. The old sentinel says nothing, it stands and shows the way as all trees, to tell tales.