Waxing Poetic

There’s this tree that sits at the corner of the building in which I work. This tree deserves to have poems written about it.

It’s a knobby old pine with funky branches and it doesn’t belong on the corner of an office building.

It belongs in front of an old cottage where fairies flutter among the violets, singing to the butterflies and bees as they flit between the dandelions and the morning glories.

Inside the cottage lives an old couple, the wife knits and bakes banana bread and irons her curtains. The husband whittles and builds model airplanes and ships in bottles. They smile indulgently at each other as they pass in the small hall that connects the front entry to the kitchen at the back of the cottage.

I go outside every day and check the mailbox for work and pass by this tree and each time I want to hug it.

I know, weird. I’m not really a tree-hugger but this tree is just so…it’s not big enough to be majestic but it’s something. Maybe it’s magical or mystical or a portal to a quieter, sweeter time.

I have imagined living in this cottage in the woods. Maybe I’m the old lady who crochets instead of knits and I make blueberry muffins because I like them better than banana bread. I imagine being away from the hustle and bustle of the modern world. I imagine having a little garden and a few chickens and being entirely self-sufficient. I don’t need anyone or anything that I don’t already have in that little cottage and the small clearing around it.

This tree would live in that little piece of the woods with me, guarding my cottage, watching over my flowers and my vegetables. It would welcome the fairies and the gnomes. It would hold off mischief and wrong-doers. Maybe this tree is the way to my little cottage. It’s how I come and go, how I visit friends and family, how they visit me in my little piece of heaven.

I don’t know. Obviously, this is all just a bit of fantasy. But that tree inspires fantasy. It inspires poetry and the imagination and all kinds of shimmery, dreamy things.