we share a wonder: ode to trees

~Ode To Trees~

I'll be driving down the road (not literally driving, that would still be considered illegal at my age) and all of a sudden out of nowhere I'll shout,"OH! Look at that tree!!! Isn't it beautiful?!?!" and continue on to rant about the branches and leaves and roots and location and color and height and etc. etc. etc. If I don't know the name I'll find it, somehow, using this marvelous contraption, the internet. If I know the name it will only add to my boasting about the beauty of the roadside tree.

I don't know how many of you out there are aware of my love of trees. It's not really to be classified as a love of all plants, because truthfully it's not; I do like flowers but I don't quite have a tremendous interest in them, and whatever other plants there are out there besides trees and flowers, well obviously I don't care too much about those because I don't even know what they are. But trees...I think I've inherited this love from my dad, whose a swamp-scientist-dirt-loving-outdoorsy guy. If he's the one whose driving the car when I burst out with loud exclamations about a tree that at first glance looks just like all the others around it, he'll usually boast about his knowledge of the tree and eye for it's beauty more than I do.

But that's okay.

I don't know quite what is is that I love so much about them. The way their branches twist and loop and point and stick out - the color and shape of whatever leaves, if any, are clinging to those branches - the shape of their trunks, the way they bend or tower, the color of their bark - the way they serve as standing, intact pieces of history that can remind of us a time long since gone by, when the houses and McDonald's and malls surrounding them were once only fields of innocently grazing sheep. There's a lot of things that can be said for a tree.
So there you go. One thing that maybe you didn't know about me. I'll try to add to your fact collection every once and a while.

(please note and appreciate that the pictures below took me two days to gather for this post - it's a long story, and you have better things to do that waste your time listening to me explain a story whose moral is really just how technically inefficient a blond can be.)

try not to skim over these pics. take a look at them. you may see more than you expect.