Saplings, Brambles and Woody Weeds

I was “mind-surfing” while driving home from my mom’s house recently. I was browsing memories about the few precious minutes spent with my brother the day before. I remembered shivering as I helped him unload feed for his cattle and store it in the old pump house, which was the headquarters for my early morning chores 40 years ago. I was searching for topics to write about in my blog. And I was out of my body exploring the shallow ravines, frozen creekbeds, and brushy fencerows that populate the landscape along the northern Indiana highway. In the winter you can see the elegant and intimate details of the unmown and uncultivated margins and corners. The saplings and brambles and woody weeds stand exposed to the elements with last summer’s leaf cover shriveled around their frozen feet. But if the stories told by these minor members of the plant kingdom are light poetry, you can read a novel in the form and structure of the old trees that stand alone at the edge of a wood or in the middle of an abandoned farmstead. Some of these trees are tall and majestic. Their trunks split into several balanced limbs. And these limbs subdivide repeatedly until they end in the tender little vessels that interact directly with the atmosphere and process the elements of life. Every season of their life has been another chapter in an epic of progress and endurance. Storms weathered with grace, pestilence repelled with impunity, new life thrust forth and supported from within. Other trees are characters in a much different story. They may have a limb that was scorched and permanently stunted by a random stroke of lightning from a sudden summer storm. Some bear the deep and indiscriminate gouges of chain saws claiming canopy space for power lines. Others have branches that are irreparably broken or grotesquely twisted by the dreadful weight of ice and snow. The underlying character of every tree is exposed by the harsh realities of winter. Majestic strength and organic symmetry are on display for all to admire. But your eye may also be drawn to the cruel scars and violent damage that many of the trees display. I praise God, the creator of all living things for the grace and beauty of the tall, straight and majestic citizens of the wooded landscapes. When he made them on the third day of creation he called them good. And I praise him for the ones with deep scars and twisted limbs. The ones who have endured the effects of sudden storms and dreadful burdens have a unique nobility and they remind me that Gods grace is sufficient for me.