The Tree Face
The First time I opened my eyes, I saw a small house being built. There were men working around it, struggling to get everything built before the weather turned cold. I was quite small then, having just grown big enough to be noticed.
I observed as the men worked building the home and watched as women would come around with refreshing drinks and tasty food. Those were the relaxing times as they laughed and dreamed about what they would do when the house was completed.
Soon enough, it was done. Then the men began selecting some surrounding trees to cut down. I was terrified, thinking I would be chosen next. For some reason, I stayed, and was never cut down. Then I learned why. The men came around in the springtime and poked sharp, little pipes into me. It didn’t really hurt. They began draining my sap for something they cooked over a fire and called maple syrup.
The hot summer days would come, and I watched all the farmers work during the day, then rest on the front porch, of the house they had built, in the cool evenings.
Then one day, a fierce fire burned the cozy home down. Oh boy did they scrambled to save what they could from the house. A beautiful, round table was rescued. But someone said the expansion boards were lost. Whatever those are. Once again, they began to build on the same spot, but this time a little bigger and with some improvements.
So, the years continued to pass. One day a young man climbed up into my high branches and began to trim some of them. He was so intense doing his job but got a little careless, and slipped off, and fell to the ground, never to move again. Sadness filled me, and I felt like it was my fault. It was my wild branches he was trimming. That was a sad time for all the people in the house too. Most of his family grew and moved away. A brother and his sister remained in the home. They had some cows who pastured around me. It was a quiet time for a while.
Then one day a young man arrived and talked to the old man. They seemed to agree on something. Within a few months I knew what the agreement was. A new family moved in. I was so happy to see children running around again. There were picnics under my branches and lots of family gatherings.
They wrapped a chain around me and attached a cute dog to me. He was a well-loved dog, I could tell. I shaded him and he relaxed under my branches. One day the dog no longer was chained to me, but the chain remained on me because I had grasp it so tightly, trying to hold onto that time. I didn’t want to let go of that cute dog they called Bones.
The children grew and moved away, and the father disappeared. The mother is still there, and she gets visits from the grown children and their families. Now she has a cat that came to her from somewhere, she named him Samson.
My trunk is split down the middle. One wild storm a lightning bolt struck me. I remember that moment when the fireball jolted me. I didn’t think I could survive that, but I did. One year, many years later, a family of raccoons nested inside my split trunk. And those baby raccoons loved the place that the lightning had opened. They were so cute with their little masked faces, growing up inside of me.
One afternoon, the mother and one daughter were sitting on the porch and the mother looked at me, and exclaimed, “I see a face on that tree!” She seemed surprised, to see me watching her. Yet all this time, all these years, I was watching her.
