This tree made me uneasy when I first saw it. It’s huge. At its base, my arms barely make it halfway around. An informed estimate of its height puts it a more that eighty feet tall.
As a prospective buyer of the property it stands on, my concern was that someday our kids would be playing around, on and under this unsteady looking character.
But we liked the place, so we bought it, and one lazy day not too long after that, I fastened a board, a three foot long pine 1″ by 2″ to the tree, using a level to set it perfectly plumb. The kids arrived, as we’d hoped they might, and I checked the board for movement periodically. It never moved; the tree never leaned one way or the other. Eventually, the board succumbed to the elements and disappeared. Other trees broke and shifted during storms. The kids got bigger, and the tree simply stood there. I imagine it’s still there.
© Mark Pelloth