This giant oak tree in my yard is the tallest in the entire neighbourhood. It towers over my house, the power lines, and radio towers (from where I stand). I couldn’t count all the branches (not pictured) or the hundreds of birds that return each day to perch in its safety and cry their hearts out.
Oak Trees are symbolic for honour, wisdom, nobility, strength, resistance, prowess, and protection. Thor, Zeus, Jupiter, Perun, gods of thunder and lightning and storms, all celebrated the Oak for its ability to hold so much inside and still stand so tall.
The bark of an oak tree can be boiled/processed and turned into medicine for healing wounds. Its pulp was historically used to make black ink. The shape of its leaves decorates mythology and military regalia.
I berate this oak tree for drowning my beloved gardens in waves of leaves that are so thick I can not clear them without gaining injury or a bad attitude.
I grumble under my breath about the acorns that constantly drop from its branches, ricocheting off my house, enticing squirrels to run and leap and scratch across my roof into the providence of this oak tree.
But when I can’t sleep, it has the perfect view of the Moon in all of its phases. When Spirit or my hormones or whatever else it is that makes me wake so often and feel anxious and alone, that tree is alive and buzzing with quiet, little life.
When I feel certain ways I don’t know how to speak about, or when my heart is so broken it would not do any good to even try, I sit weeping into its roots.
As an Appalachian woman who has wept more times to peeking roots beneath seasons of canopies than I have wept within the presence of warm embraces, and caring eyes …
I found home within your poem…. A rare but wonderful treat, to find home, like mine, in literature. Thank you for writing.