A Mournful Commune with the Trees

The damp leaves shuffled softly beneath my feet. Their hushed announcement heard by only I and the gossiping trees. The trees wondered, chattering away as if I couldn’t hear them. why I was there? Why I didn’t act like other boys? Charging swiftly and whooping and laughing and hitting things… They never walked, they ran… The trees were suspicious of a boy who walked.

I paused to notice how the red maple by the far end of the bridge was wearing her best red in years. She flirted with a breeze going by and it tugged the corner of my mouth into a stale grin. One it hadn’t seen in a very long time.

The passage of time was different for the trees. They did not see wrinkles forming in the corners of smiles, nor movements painfully slow as aches introduced themselves in new ways. They didn’t notice how the boys grew, and went away… It was just another season, and after the winter sleep was over, they would be back again, hitting things and whooping and laughing.

I was on the bridge now walking towards her, and she seemed to blush with my attentive presence. She was not used to being looked at in such a way, and certainly not by a boy. The last boy who had looked at her had only looked long enough to carve his initials and those of his sweetheart in her side, and then his look was gone. He grabbed the girl and swung her around laughing and kissed her, and they walked arm in arm back across the bridge and out of sight.

I came up underneath the vermillion shade and put my hand against her sun warmed trunk. She was still as lovely as I had remembered… lovelier even. She seemed to question me, casting flecks of sunshine through onto my upturned face.

She asked me why I didn’t run, or laugh like the other boys? Why I looked at her now so strangely?

I laughed at that. I mean really laughed… A big, booming, exhausting, soulful laugh until I could not laugh anymore… and then I cried. I cried as if to wash my soul of the oldness that had cobwebbed so slowly and yet so completely over it. I had not noticed it until now, and I mourned the ignorance with which I had passed so many years.

Wiping my eyes, I looked around the cavern of my soul. It was empty now except for something on the other side that I could not quite make out. I walked over to the corner where I now saw that a boy sat in grimy clothes. He did not look up, but instead had his attention turned to a small stone he held in his hands. I put my hand on his shoulder. His eyes turned to me, and I understood.

This was the boy that the tree saw. The one she recognized and loved. The one she had seen laugh, and play, and run through the forest. I had forgotten him. Forgotten him underneath my own piles of work, and the drum of the mundane existence that I had come to accept and expect. Grabbing his hand, I lifted him to his feet and through a fresh rush of tears told him that I was so very sorry. Being the sweet child that he was, he was quick to forgive me and the light once again came to his eyes. He shook out his legs in an awkward boyish way and began to run. The clean, sweet air of Autumn filled his lungs till they almost burst, and he let out the loudest “whooopyaahhh!!!” that he could.

The red maple stood, gazing down at the strange boy who laughed and cried under her canopy. He had always been a boy to her but somehow, he had lost himself for a season. Maybe he had been sleeping like she slept during the cold months… But now the boy was here. He was alive, and beautiful, and just as she had remembered.