Epic Waiting & Juneteenth

Today is my Juneteenth 7th wedding anniversary. Instead of trying to capture my marriage to describe it to you, I choose literary reference. Today my life is more of The Old Man and the Sea and Waiting for Godot, than Romeo & Juliet and When Harry Met Sally. Telling you about my life brings the same feelings as reading The Old Man and the Sea with more boredom and less similarity to Homer's Odyssey. I have always identified with Odysseus's wife waiting at home. My life is a story of epic waiting, and waiting and waiting. If you haven't read Waiting for Godot, please don't.

All literature aside, last night, my husband and I celebrated our anniversary with a sunset sailboat cruise across Choctawhatchee Bay. It was a beautiful thing, even with the drunk Bammers from Mobile who were entertaining. Big fish stories were told by everyone, with wine, cheese, stars, & music, but no dancing. I was thinking of what it might be like to be on the sailboat with only one or two other people, and to share silence & stars.

This is an oak tree from my house in Oakwood. I am not sure what variety it is, but it is really beautiful.

As most of my readers know, yesterday, Auburn released a confirmation that the live oaks at Toomer's Corner had been poisoned with a herbicide used to kill trees. The Auburn trees are symbolic, iconic, wrapped in tradition (and TP). I just looked at a picture from Twitpic, and the tree looks much worse than I remember from my Auburn days. I remember its shade. Considering all the Tp-ing and hosing down afterward it has taken through the years, everyone knows it will die one day. We are just sad to see it go before its time.


http://www.thewareaglereader.com/2011/02/toomers-tree-hug-rally-may-do-more-harm-than-good/

Here is a poem I have been reading, thinking about my own trees before Al from Dadeville acted.

To An Oak Tree

Three hundred changing summers, winters too,
Since first the quivering sapling struggled through,
A hundred thousand days since you were born,
And took to earth from out the green acorn.
Survived the pounding hoof and rooting pig,
Put out first fragile arms, and then the big.

Two hundred years ago you firmly stood,
In promise rich as any in the wood,
Before your brothers in the claim to space,
With root and leaf creating your own place,
Had heard the thunder roar and breezes sing,
And from the storm given shelter to a king.

The next two hundred years had passed you by,
To find you yet fit neighbor to the sky,
And all man's need of ship, and church, and fire,
Had not assailed your own tremendous spire,
Which year by year from sap to solid core,
Unseen, unheard, took on a little more.

But nigh four thousand scintillating moons,
Three hundred Christmases, three hundred Junes
Have gone for nought and ever you must kneel
Before this artisan with bitter steel,
And to the sun lose acids raw,
Until the log is fit to meet the saw.

Till now beneath the softly-singing plane,
Your lustrous boards give up the secret grain,
And let the tiger-stripe medullar shine,
Across your straight and sturdy growing line,
And he who works with every shaving hears
How you grew into glory with the years.

And was it only Evolution's twist,
That man and timber came to co-exist,
Or did some greater mind regard that seed,
And plan it thus, so fit for every need?
Look at this chair, this door, that roof and know,
They could not be unless He meant it so.

E.C. Wells