My Tree

I love this tree.


My, now adult, children used to climb it when we moved here 19 years ago. It was their stopping point on our walk back home from nursery and then school. One of my sons got stopped by the local policeman for being too high up in its branches without supervision! 😲😂 Until the poor man saw me marching towards him (about to ask was he really telling a child off for climbing a tree) and he suddenly decided to leave...  I've realised over the years people tend not to argue with a redhead.😇😂

We first took our dog as a little puppy out of the house and he sat near this tree.


My youngest son is almost 13, yet still climbs this tree frequently and swings on the branches like a monkey. He is that child that sits in trees when he is angry!

Over the years we've often looked at the ladybird eggs and larva on it. How there are more ladybirds if there are greenfly on it too. Well I did - as they climb! 

I know my own grandad, who was born in 1923 in a house less than 100m from my door, used to walk up this very road (then a cart track with fields at the side), scrumping apples on his way to school.

My Nan, Grandad, Mum and Aunt used to live in a house almost opposite mine as young children, also walking to the same school as my older children did.

... was this tree here then?


Connected.


Each day I walk the dog round our local park, use the outdoor gym when my body and the weather are up to it, and unless it's pouring with rain or blowing a gale I sit on the now almost fully broken branch at the trees side. Even when it's wet and I don't want to sit, most of the time I will still lean on or hold one of its branches for a few breaths.

I breathe in the tree. For almost a year (since I posted this - Even Trees Wobble)  I have now consciously sent it's balance and connection to the earth back into my body to help ground me. To stop and accept my wobbling.

Even when it's branches are moving the roots are firmly in the ground. Strong. What I need to feel in myself.



It helps.



I often lean my head back onto its trunk. Leaning on the horrid numb part of my skull that I cannot feel properly. It feels like the trunk is extending into my brain, down into my neck. The 'board' I feel in my head when I lean on it like this.

But as weird as it feels it also feels alive, that the tree is somehow reconnecting my head, my cut nerves.

Or that it doesn't matter. 

None of it matters in the scheme of things.

.