#134

Something special about yesterday's post number that I neglected to mention is that one plus three plus three is seven, which is great, also that 133 is very visually pleasing in itself, a shapely and very soothing number. Saying one hundred and thirty three out loud provides an excellent cadence. Could be used in place of a mantra.

*

There is a huge, ruinous willow tree near my house. When my family first moved into the neighborhood it was hale and hulking out of its boundaries; more alive, huger, more treeish than reality could allow for, but you could see it almost, how there was more willow than tree. Living sigil. First and strongest among kings of willows.

Disease ripped through it and it has lost more than half of itself. Nearly all of its old crown, two boles, and a good portion of the main trunk rotted and sloughed off, came down in hard weather, withered away to fine brown dust. A tree whose leaves and pendulous branches were once so thick and numerous they created an elongated curtain dome thirty feet in diameter to hide under, hands parting branches for three seconds before you could enter the sanctuary, now sports leafage on one side only, from a meager set of stunted branches.

What limbs remain are full of woodpecker holes, many enlarged by starlings, scarred by the ravages of the illness that nearly destroyed it, and give the tree the impression of a stagger, as the remaining limb system was once but one of four mighty tops.

I've thought the tree was going to die for sure this time at least fifteen times. No one bothers about it. There has been no treatment or care. It has fought for its life alone and unaided and still it puts out flowers every spring, still it reaches up into the air. Brutalized, shrunk, weakened, still it breathes and sinks its roots and reaches toward the sky, straining for its life.


--JL