Renewal

There’s a gum tree outside the side gate into the park and it is truly majestic. It soars perhaps a more than  a hundred feet high and sways and dances in the breeze. If you lay down under it and just stare up, I reckon the  melody and the contrast with the blue blue sky would be plenty to hypnotise.

That’s the poetic view of it. The reality of living next door to this girl is that the pool is always full of long spindly leaves that require specialty vacuuming and once every year or 2 it grows too big for its breeches and it bursts out of its bark!! Bits of bark come lose and fly high for a while, before landing, – yeah you guessed it, in the pool. Some of these bits are tiny and so are sucked up easily enough but some of them are big enough to knock out a small child and so need to be individually scooped up.

We go from AHH to ARGH to Ahh in a moment.

The tree trunk beneath the shedding is smooth and beautiful and all the scars from its growth and lovers’s etchings are for a little while at least rubbed out.

It is such a curious thing watching this tree shrug off the bark. I have stood a picked off large chunks just to give it a bit of a hand. It has become something of an addiction. I do so enjoy testing myself to see what size of chunk I can remove in one go. It’s like picking off bits of skin when you are peeling only this is far more satisfying. Sadly I have done all I can without the use of a ladder or climbing onto Steve’s shoulders and that would be too obsessive and more than a little dangerous for me and for him!!

So now I get to watch the old girl’s arms slough off the dead stuff and wait for the whole tree to be smooth and lovely. Reckon this must mean there is still hope for my withered old feet and barnacled hands.