the tree

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This week on (fiction) friday we have been given the task of writing about a tree. This is my contribution

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One hundred years ago, a hundred acorns landed on the ground around an old oak tree that had stood there for a hundred years.

Most simply rotted away. But their decomposition was not in vain, for they lived on in the soil enriching it to the benefit of those which survived.

A few years later one sturdy sapling stood tall, reaching toward the sun, soaking up the rain and steadfastly resisting the wind.

In time the stout sapling became a tree. An oak tree.

In the years that followed it looked on as successive generations came and went.

Small children climbed onto to its branches, the same branches that played host to the birds that wove their intricate nests amid the twigs and leaves.

Hearts were carved into its bark in which couples declared their undying love for each other.

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Squirrels scampered up and down with their cargo of nuts whilst brightly painted woodpeckers rat-a-tatted away busily creating hollow caves in the mighty oaks massive trunk.

The ravages of the weather left it unmoved. From the coldest winters to the hottest summers, it took everything in its stride. It never failed to produce a canopy of greenest green with every new spring and palette of extraordinary colours with the onset of each autumn.

But for the first time in its existence it received a threat. A threat too great to resist. The place that it had made its home for a hundred years was to become home to a hundred families in a hundred new dwellings.

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The day before it meets its untimely end, a small child gathers up a handful of acorns which have fallen to the ground. In the next hundred years one of these tiny green acorns will grow into a mighty oak that his children and his children’s children will climb, and carve and love.

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