I am an old tree. The lines on my barked skin have deepened and roughened as the years have passed on.  The leaves on my treetop color easier, faster as the seasons change. I’ve been in this place, this area, nearly all my life, as I floated on the air in my youth, searching for an ideal place to land.  Testing the land to make sure it was right for me.

When I settled my skin was soft and fair.  I was green underneath, naive about much of what life had to offer.  The harshness of the seasons and the joy of love.  That joy I found in my youth was because, when I finally landed, she was there.  Her skin too was fair and her leaves fairer than mine.  Our branches tangled for many years, blissfully wrapping and folding upon one another as winds and storms tested our ability to maintain contact.  But we survived.

We weren’t alone, she and I.  There were others nearby that had always been part of our life; some more intimately than others.  They never intruded upon us, but, for both of us, their branches would brush one of ours and, for a moment, we would wonder.  We would wonder what it would be like, even if briefly, what it would feel like to be entangled with the other trees. Would it somehow change us? Weaken us for the storms surely to come again.  Despite the brushes of other branches, the curiosity of their sensation, the curling and curving of their shapes, our branches maintain to this day.  But despite our age, the curiosity remains, and we live on.

Our three saplings are growing nearby.  One day their branches will tangle with another’s and we will fade, creaking and moaning as age wrests time away.  I will watch the saplings grow and remember my youth.  I will remember her touch and the brushes of others.  No matter the circumstance, my roots are planted, unmoved.  I shall be here until the end.  I am an old tree.

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