The Hawthorn Grows

A hawthorn grows on a windswept hill. Its bark is scarred from a tether long cut, and a groove semicircular where the wire once looped round. The tree flesh folded over the constriction as it grew, inevitable expansion strangling itself until the moisture, cold rain, snow, and fog and the changing temperatures finally oxidized the formerly galvanized steel. Flecks yet remain in the woody skin of the tree, a blackened dimple in place of a long, dead tie. Fragments of orange, gray, and black lie in the grass like the corpse of a whip snake long dessicated and dissolved, the tree set free at last, forever scarred.

A foot or so below on the wood lies another scar more brutal, more damaging. No tree could survive such a wound, a decapitation, and one tree did not as this hawthorn lives on through the roots of another, its own native roots torn and scattered by wind and forgotten. A gnarled, crooked tree died so that this thorn tree could live through the work of grafting, of having been uprooted, dismembered, resurrected by careful, calloused hands. The scar a reminder not of pain but of life and of qualities valued in old, gray eyes. The roots creased the ground, stony and drab, like strong fingers breaking gravel into fine soil, drawing life and nourishment from…from nothing.

These stones never lived before, their granite surfaces marked by deep-fired crystals, but not a fossil can be found in even one pebble. No limestone here, no caliche or sandstone. Only lifeless, sterile, metamorphic children of a former monument, a mountain peak, worn and etched, crumbled by time and stirred by wind, bird, rodent, and invertebrates uncountable and the dusted remains of a thousand generations of things that never lived here, could never live in this cold, barren expose, until a single seed set by a startled, lost bird in a narrow, shallow cleft sprouted by freezing ice melt from a glacier with nowhere to hide from the sun so close in the thin, thin air. The tree grew gnarled, never blossomed. No flowers to see nor bees to hear.

So came the planter and cut the tree down to save his prize, save it for a lonely hidden life too far to be seen, too high to know warmth. Now blossoms the hawthorn up the hill from an imported hive. Now admires the planter its thorns and frost-bitten branches, lonely and scarred still growing in rocks.