Triple M & Company: I think that I shall never see, a thing as lovely as a tree.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

I think that I shall never see, a thing as lovely as a tree.

Tree.

Now that is a 4 letter word I can stand behind.

I love trees. I wish there were more of them here.

They are like....well...a welcome oasis of relief from the harsh sun beating down on you in a barren desert. Something like that.

They don't just randomly run amuck here like they do in other places. When I visited the East Coast back in high school I was flabbergasted to see trees growing on trees. A whole new world! And when I moved to Utah I thought it was the rain forest, and yet my east coast cousin thought she had moved to the desert. Funny how perspective works.

Anyway, down here you have to plant trees.

Actually...I have an outlier to the bell curve. Let me tell you a little story.

When we moved into our house 3 years ago, our backyard was hideous. Don tells me I use dramatic vocabulary sometimes, like "hideous," but I stand by that word. It is the perfect word for our old backyard. Well, there was this little patch of dirt, intended for something green and pretty. So we planted something or another...and I think it probably died. Because we probably forgot to water it and it was so ugly back there we thought, what is the point? Like lipstick on a pig. Well that is what I thought. Don tends to see the larger picture. I don't mean to lump him in the Debbie Downer corner.

Anyway, then one day we found a "weed" sprouting up. We let it go...and let it go...and then we started to think maybe it was not a weed afterall. Maybe it was something pretty.

And it was! It was a tree! And 3 years later look at it's gloriousness! And how fortuitous is it that it planted itself right smack in the middle of our little dirt area? That tree I tell you, is a kind (and detail oriented) soul.Thank you kindly for the shade, dearest tree of ours! We don't even care that you drop millions of pods! But our neighbor might. Which reminds me...I wonder if it is the same neighbor who was the receiver of our patio table umbrella that went flying away one day during a storm. We didn't go looking for it, for obvious reasons. "Uh sorry about the broken window, but could we get our umbrella back?"

And then there is this tree...which is about 2 years old...and well...struggling. It is a ficus. A very "pretty" tree, but slow to really bloom.

Moral of the story:

Just because you are pretty when you are a baby doesn't mean you will blossom as fast as something not so pretty as a baby, which can grow taller than you, and then become a model because they got tall really fast and skinny.

I think this is a very useful lesson, don't you?