This prompt interested me, because I feel like there’s two distinct lines that I could go down. The first is just a generalised favourite tree. For which Id go with a big old oak tree, one which has lived for centuries with a huge sweeping a canopy. A tree that has a tree-house nestled up in it’s boughs, and an old tyre swing hanging from one of it’s branches.
It’s the kind of tree that you dream about as a child. One which you imagine spending hours playing in, climbing it, hiding up in the branches. The kind of tree that you imagine having your first nervous kiss in the tree-house, which is also the place you go to cry after your first heart break. The tree where you spend hours on sunny afternoons reading a book resting up against the trunk.
It’s the kind of tree with memories.
The second way I could take this would be to talk about a specific tree, one which I know and has meaning to me. For that I would have to pick the old apple tree at my childhood home. Its been there forever, I’m not even sure when it was planted though I think it was my parents who planted it.
It’s a tree with character. Instead of growing straight up like most trees do it’s grown almost side-wards. It has no logical shape or branch pattern, and it’s certainly not an attractive tree. But it is a likeable tree. It gives us cooking apples every autumn, and it makes a fantastic scouting tree for birds using the bird feeders.
In fact, most of my afternoon just today was spent watching the birds run up and down the trunk, flitting form branch to branch, to find the yummiest bird feeder hanging from it’s branches, or to brave the feeder nearby. It was where the little birds waited for the bigger birds to have finished before they went for their food. It’s not an attractive tree. But it is full of life.
A Place of Mine 