Tree

Maybe trees get tired, too. Maybe this tree decided, after standing tall for hundreds of years, that it just wanted to rest its eyes, like so many grandmothers after long walks. Maybe the leaning downward, the sinking to its side, took another hundred years until the tree is mostly horizontal.
This tree has its reasons to be so sleepy, I’m sure of that. If I were the type who needed to know things, I would cruelly cut the tree and count the rings of its trunk. It would not be easy—there would be hundreds of circles encircling circles, like stains from coffee mugs always set on the same place. I know the tree is old. I know the tree is older than I will ever be. Its entire body is gnarled like aging hands no one wants to hold and the roots have deteriorated into paper-thin tubes. Along the trunk the wood bubbles into jagged lumps. They look like clusters of rough eyes, or like barnacles clinging to sea rocks. Maybe this tree is confused, like grandmothers who believe they are in the circus, walking the tightropes. This tree thinks it’s underwater. It gives off a wet smell and in each crevice and every hollow knot the soil is damp and dank. It is as though the tree lived underwater and one day sprang up to attach its roots to something more permanent than shifting sand.
Though the trunk is practically lying on the ground, the branches have kept their youthful ambition. They twist around each other at odd angles, each detour taking twenty years to make. These are lackadaisical branches, taking their time on their journey to the sky. Somehow they knew that they would have an eternity to get there. The branches have all the time in the world for winding journeys and spontaneous side streets. Each thick branch ends in a delicate twig and from every twig a pod drips down. They are long and brown, like fibrous vanilla beans. Tiny birds flutter from bean to bean, shaking them like wooden wind chimes. On the trunk of the tree the soft carpet of moss is slightly worn down, perhaps from humans looking for a seat. But up where only little bird feet walk the moss is lush and dark.
Wait. Maybe this tree is so old it is not even living. How can you tell if a tree is dead? Maybe I visited on the day of her wake. Perhaps the moss and the birds were saying goodbye to a tree that had lived for so long.
I would rather not believe that. I like to think that instead of ‘goodbye’ this grandmother tree constantly whispers ‘goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.’ She sighs the words with every twinkle of her vanilla beans, with every inch she lays herself down and with every young girl she hold in her wrinkled arms. Eternally going to sleep, but never sleeping.