Under the Maple Tree

Losson Park

On a warm summer day

With a slight breeze,

The park went on parking.

A cardinal sang in a new bush of knotweed.

Offended by a nearby human person on a bench,

It fluttered away

And continued its song elsewhere.

The creek sat mostly still.

It had been a dry summer,

The water shallow

And brown.

It was past the time of most flowers,

The exuberance of spring had since faded away.

There were, however,

A few here and there.

Bright yellows

And muted pinks and purples.

All in all,

It was a lovely August day.

The trees rejoiced in their silence

In their stillness.

Their bright green leaves in full display,

For the turning of autumn

Was a few weeks out.

They provided ample shade

For the footpaths below.

They sat,

As trees do,

In patient quiet

Growing at a speed far slower

Than even the turtles

Who may call the nearby creek their home.

With every slight breeze,

The trees and their leaves

Sang the bristling song of summer.

They offered so much,

These slowly-beating hearts of the woods.

As always,

The stones rustled below the trees

As human persons made their way along the trails.

Crunch after paced crunch,

The trees bared witness to these journeys.

After a while,

The crunches rang out two by two,

As if two sets of feet were walking together.

They were,

Excitedly.

Oblivious.

A teenage boy and girl

Traipsed along the trails.

They fumbled into their pockets

For snacks bordering on the level of poison.

They devoured them,

And tossed the wrappers aside.

The brightly-colored plastic

Slowly drifted to the ground

Where it would remain

For hundreds of years.

The two continued on,

Music blasting into their ears

Through the largest of headphones

That blocked out the nearby symphonies

Of bugs, birds, and babbling brooks.

Lost in blissful, ignorant infatuation,

The teenagers stopped for a brief moment.

The boy pulled a small knife from his pocket

And walked over to the closest tree:

A towering, ancient maple.

The boy grinned at the girl,

And began to awkwardly carve

The shape of an unnecessarily large heart

Into the skin of the tree.

Within it,

He added his and her initials with a plus sign between them

In sharp, jagged characters.

He completed his work

With a “4ever” below

As if their teenage love

Would outlast the ages,

Beyond the stars and supernovas,

Past black holes and spiraling galaxies.

The two embraced

In the forever-awkward teenage kiss

Slobber and braces collided.

While most trees

Are generally forgiving,

This particular maple

Knew how to hold a grudge.

It had watched countless of its kin

Experience the same debasement,

The same humiliation.

It had seen the lack of respect for the woods,

The bright-green cans of potato chips,

Caught among its roots.

While in searing pain

From its new wound,

The tree shook loose a seed pod in the breeze

That spiraled down from the sky

And landed snugly in the boy’s backpack.

The teenagers moved along

And left the park.

They walked to the boy’s nearby home,

And upon arrival,

He placed his backpack on the back porch.

Distracted,

He forgot to say,

“I love you,”

To the girl.

They had only known each other for two weeks,

But these words were vitally important.

The girl stormed off,

Screaming that it was over.

The boy,

Heartbroken,

Ran to his bedroom.

The weather in kind reflected his utter torment.

Gray clouds rolled in,

And an ominous wind picked up.

In fact, it blew the maple seed out from his backpack

And into the field behind his house.

There, it finally met the earth,

And was covered by the storm’s rain.

In the spring, it sprouted.

The years passed,

And the tree grew,

Determined.

The boy moved out, moved back,

Grew up himself.

His parents withered and died.

He inherited the house

And left it unkempt as he grew old himself.

However, he always took pride in his lawn.

It was pristinely sanitized,

Green, short, filled with poisons to keep the weeds and insects away.

It was unnatural.

He always made sure to mow just to the edges of the field.

As he grew older,

He found the lawn to be more and more of a challenge,

But he always did what he could to keep the wild at bay.

One day,

Many years later,

And decades since he last thought about the teenage girl he knew while in the park,

He sauntered along the edges of the field.

In the shadow of a very tall maple tree,

He very slowly manicured his lawn.

Another ominous windstorm picked up,

Gray clouds rolled in

And thunder cracked above.

He stood up,

Straightened his rickety knees,

And began to walk in a straight line back towards his decrepit house

At the pace of an old creek turtle.

Just then,

A gale of unimaginable strength coursed across the field.

The maple tree loosened its roots

And knew the moment had arrived.

It lined up its fall,

And quickly uprooted itself

With the generous help of the gale.

As it fell,

The old man swore he could hear a voice scream

“Justice!”

Whistling on the wind.

But he paid it no mind.

The maple tree fell directly on top the old man,

Crushing him.

He had no friends,

No family,

So instead of feeding the lawn poisons,

The lawn feasted on him,

And it slowly reverted

Back to the wild.

His old, bitter bones forever lost

Under the maple tree.