SPRING IS IN THE AIR!
I’m late posting here this month. In fact I’ll be lucky if I get this online before the 31st. I’ve finally sat down to put together the thoughts I have pondered these last few weeks. March has been busy for me….very busy with tax season. Through these days I have grieved over the necessity to have a 50 year old cottonwood tree taken down from my back yard. I don’t know how big the old girl really was because the entire top of the tree broke off at some time and lay horizontal between some rather sketchy looking branches waiting for the right wind or snow load to release where I might find it busted through my porch or house roof. The broken tree top and and debris over the years constantly reminded me that she was too old to remain standing…and I am too old to take her down. Robynn jokes about the fact that this was the first thing in our almost 39 years of marriage I had taken care of for me by another professional. I felt really stupid watching four young men scale up and down that tree dropping limbs, chipping and loading very heavy logs. The usefulness of the tree hadn’t ended though. The young owner of the company said he would be using that tree to heat his shop. My usefulness has not ended either. I have a lot of life yet to live and love. The tree had scattered millions of seeds over her lifetime. She probably created other tree hazards around the county by wind blown or seed infested bird poop. Life continues……
The tree kept growing all those years. It didn’t have to start over each season, it built upon the previous season. That is the way life should be. We don’t need to start over every time the season changes or a bump in the road occurs. We take the lessons from life as nutrition to build toward the next page in our story book. Life is precious. That is why I grieved to have that old tree removed. I kind of grieved that I couldn’t do it myself. Both me and that tree grew old and had to change. Unlike the tree however, I don’t plan on being some random guy’s fuel to heat his shop.