Puzzling

Have you ever looked at a person and wonder how they manage to survive? You know what I mean? The type that is hard on their body and who does nothing right, no good food, too much partying or whatever. The ones who look like they don’t respect the life they have, in fact they punish themselves with all the vices they can dream up. But as you watch them live to be a ripe old age despite never having eaten a salad in their life, it becomes clear that survival is sometimes not a matter of good planning, it is sometimes – dare I say, most cases – just good luck.

Clyde the tree is sort of like this. He is rotting, he is leaning ~15 – 45 degrees and the ground where his roots hold is shallow. Storm after storm, year after year, I wonder if this will be the one that shakes him from the earth where he was once just a little seed. He goes on. Even through last year’s horrible drought and into this year he lives. Each spring, I have assumed that this would be the year where he does not sprout a leaf, but somehow he manages to get the sap flowing and go on living for another set of seasons.

This year despite his increased lean of about 5 degrees, it is the first where I think he will sprout again next year just as long as his roots don’t tip out of the ground. Survival is so fragile, even for tough guys like Clyde and tough women like me.