In Norse mythology, the whole Universe is a tree: Yggdrasill. It joins and shelters all worlds, and her messenger -- the go-between of gods and demons, giants and men -- is a mean little squirrel.
The Yggdrasil suffers. But it is the timeless Guardian Tree, and it never dies.
Of course, that's just one of myriad tree myths. They're an easy hanger for belief, trees. Targets for cliche and epicly bad poetry, but justifiably so. Few people live to see the birth and death of a great tree. They're very easy to take for granted.
When we moved to Florida, I was eight. Our house was brand new, built on a dirt lot full of weeds and not much else. We came in at night with blackened feet, and knees and necks, pulled sand spur spikes out of our fingers and toes. For my father, this was a blank canvass. And within months there was jasmine and scheflera, baby palms and citrus saplings and who-knows-what. Over the years, he's experimented with all sorts of plants: roses, pumpkins, tomatoes, ficus, butterfly bushes. It's a jungle, now. The configurations change, but always it is green and lush. My dad can make anything grow.
Well, anything that doesn't require sun. See, there was something else on that dirt lot: a massive live oak. It was two trees, practically. So enormous that even though it sat on our property line, bisected by a wooden fence, there was enough for two families. And we did all of the family things you do with a great tree. We tied ropes with tires and hammocks to it. We carved at it and cursed the layers of leaves it dropped year-round. This tree raised thousands, perhaps millions of angry squirrel babies, all chattering proprietarily from its heavy limbs. I imagined that this tree had shielded Seminoles and dinosaurs.
Today is the first day, perhaps since the beginning of the world, that there is no tree. There is no tree because time and disease and chainsaws can dismantle any Universe. Let it be a lesson to you, says the tree -- because I am always surprised by this lesson -- that all things go.
