“Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a Hope Tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.” ~Mark Twain
My great-uncle died today. This was an image of him that I made in 2010.
He was leading me to a pair of trees that he had planted from seeds with the express purpose of hanging up a hammock between them when they were big enough and he was old enough to have time to enjoy such things. Later, he said that he told himself that when he could reach around those trees, it would be time.
He never hung a hammock between those two trees because by the time they were big enough the city had expanded Highway 431 to four lanes only about 50ft away and the noise was too much to make it pleasant. When he planted them, the road was an obscure capillary between two obscure North Alabama towns: “I was going to sit here and only talk to the people who would take the time to come so far off the road to talk to me.” And such is the way of things.
But in the end he lost his hearing. So I suppose that would have worked out for him.
Except… the tornadoes in 2011 knocked down most of the trees that he and his father had planted over the past century. What once was a war on leaves each fall was now a field reminiscent of Flanders where the enormous roots of trees that had reached a point of diminishing return once stood.
And so it is that many of us go. Trees. Men. Houses. Countries. There is no fixed point in the universe – that’s just science – yet somehow all things return to whence they came. The trees. The rivers.
It really is too bad those two trees were so close to that stupid road. That would have been a good place to grow old.
Stay tuned,
-Noah D.
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PS: The above colour images were made on April 25, 2011. It appears that day had some significance after all.
