I can’t stand it anymore. Deep down in the bowels of my apartment complex next to dumpsters and rows of cars I notice her. There she leans, tossed out, forgotten, the faint keen pine smell of her dry leaves barely discernible next to the wreak of trash. I could wax poetic about how unfair this final act feels to me; how once she was picked among many (after having been cut down, which I’ll never understand), chosen to carry radiance in her verdant branches, helping to illuminate “comfort and joy” somewhere beyond this dark dungeon of which she now has been pitched. But I won’t go on with this. It’s pointless pondering that goes nowhere except into deeper sadness.
I just need to look at her and remind her from my heart to hers that she still mattered. That hopefully very soon she’ll be lifted up and returned to mulch and compost and become part of the very earth that birthed her. And that maybe someday there will be a gentler, far more compassionate way of saying goodbye to others like her that once mattered. I do have hope for that…
