I was
walking my dog yesterday. It was very
windy, exceptionally windy. Wickedly
windy. As I walked onto, into my
driveway and approached my car, the walkway, those familiar surroundings that
indicate you have returned home, I heard a cracking sound. It wasn’t familiar;
it was the cracking of some kind of death. The cracking was getting louder and louder and
ominous and, well, just scary. As I
heard what seemed to be too loud of a crack, a splitting, a separation of life
from limb, I looked up in the direction of that earthly and otherworldly noise.
I heard the
last bit of cracking, as it got even louder, and saw a giant tree trunk
separating from its body, the main trunk, its “supporter” and partner and well,
it’s rock – or wood in this case. And it
started falling, gracefully, quietly, after all that cracking, it was so
quiet. But it was falling toward my dog
and me. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing
was really happening. But as they say, in some split instant, as the splitting
was finishing, I was screaming and running away from that sound. That sound, that gigantic noise and ageless
limb and trunk and bark and hollowed out crumbs, was falling and following me,
rapidly all of a sudden.
We made it
far enough away, far enough that even the flimsy, scratchy branches at the end
of that giant monstrous trunk couldn’t touch us. We were safe - shaken and frightened and so
close to nature’s random grip. But we
were alive. The tree must not be. It’s going to be chopped and sawed and sliced
and diced and carted away. It’s sad, you
know.
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