shanmonster | Little Tree Huggers

Going back to that campground where I lived....

As I said, we were in a valley. It was more like a hole filled with shady trees: an oasis in the desert without palms or a pond, but there was a lazy, white-caked creek running through, and plenty of coniferous trees.

I was a bit rebellious, then, in a quiet sort of way. I already detailed how I bucked the system with my political involvement, but there was yet another transgressive act. My sister

raine_storm and I found a tree. It was a pretty little thing, no more than four or five feet tall. It may have been a young jigsaw pine, or maybe a spruce or fir tree. I really can't remember. What I do remember is that it had a wonderful shape. It was the Platonic ideal of a pretty little conifer. It had the perfect point at the top, and angled down in a lovely A-line skirt of dark green. It grew on the steep hill that went to the plateau above our campground.

For Jehovah's Witness kids, we were awfully pagan. We revered this little tree. We treated it something like a favoured doll, or--dare I say it?--an idol. We swept the base of the tree clear of old pine needles and such, and pulled the weeds from the ground so it had its very own patch of earth. We brought the tree offerings. We sang to it. We dressed it up and decorated its base the best we could, with bits of ribbon, coloured bits of paper, pebbles, and such. We scoffed pink and orange bits of surveyor ribbon and tied little bows on the tree. This was no Christmas tree. Amongst all its naked brethren, it shone like an arboreal drag queen.

We didn't tell any of the other kids about the tree. This was our secret.

Then one day after school, I went to tend to my tree and found it beyond my reach. The company which owned the tractor storage area on the plateau had done some fencing. Our pretty little tree was the very corner of a new fenced-in area, just far enough through the fence that I couldn't quite reach through and touch its branches. My fingers waggled tantalizingly close.

We told Dad about it. He was unimpressed that the surveyors had been so callous as to pen in the obviously attended tree, but what could we do? It's not like we owned any of the land. We just had our travel trailer in the valley below.

My visits to the tree became fewer. For a while, I'd go every day after school, but seeing the weeds grow up around the roots and the ribbons fade and unravel was depressing, and finally I just stopped going altogether.