“THE STRANGEST TREE I EVER DID SEE” by Fizzyjinks

Families are funky. Like fingerprints, like screams, like the trails of sap along a tree-truck, there are no two alike. The metaphors are limitless. I’ll put an ethnic spin on my favorite: families are like baklava; sweet, always with a few nuts lurking within.

We spring from the tree (an acorn tree, because the nut-job metaphoris too true to give up), without being asked if we want to live, but immediately breathing in and intoxicating ourselves with the air of life. From that first drunken breath, we are hooked: hooked on a tree that mayor may not want us, hooked on a life that may or may not welcome us, hooked on a desire to survive and thrive. As we grow and unfurl our heads and learn to look left and right and up and down, our perception of our tree grows respectively. There are many others like us, some older, some newer. There are more trees—in fact, there’s a world of forests! We learn of the other branches, we smile with our blossoms at them and play, we may duck as they lash out angrily at us in the wind, we may pout as they tauntingly rain their leaves on our heads come autumn.

We discover that we are independent, in a sense—the wind can free our leaves from the branch and take us all over the world, and we may entwine our petals with the petals of another tree in the spring. But we cannot run from our roots, and even should we conjure a wind to break our branch and free us from our tree, we won’t fall too far away. Like it or not, we belong to this tree, and especially to the branches closest to us with which we’re most closely enjoined. If we love our tree, and if our tree loves us, we are lucky. Faces will be born and will die with the seasons, tempers will turn with the winds, and united we stand against the hunter who strolls along whistling with his ax.

~Angreek87