I love trees and I love history. So it is no surprise that I am retelling these two great, historic tree tales.
The first begins outside the office of this publication's sister paper, Ozarks Farm & Neighbor – Missouri, in Lebanon, Mo. There’s a tall blue spruce tree that sits to the south of that building. The office there was built on land that is our publisher, Stan Coffman’s original family farm. Well, that spruce tree’s ‘mother’ lives in California. The large tree was carried back in a wet napkin as a seedling, in Stan's mother's purse, on a train from California to Missouri. I wonder how many trees we pass in a day with such a unique story…
Then there’s a sycamore story at my boyfriend’s family farm. There’s a particular field with a particularly large sycamore tree growing up in the middle of it. I’ve been told that this sycamore tree is quite a pain to mow around in the summer when my boyfriend’s family is making hay. But apparently long, long ago when the living patriarch of the family was just a boy, he consistently mowed over a sycamore sapling year after year. Then one year his granddad told him he should just let the tree grow. Having his words honored, his great-great grandson still mows around that sycamore to this day…
I guess I was just raised to appreciate such stories.
Growing up I saw my dad pick up an acorn and say things like, “you know, this seed contains all the genetic code to make life and struggle to live, and grow 100 feet tall and then procreate by the hundreds of thousands.” Maybe that’s why I liked these two stories so much. To me they are as valuable as the life that is enclosed in seeds scattered on the ground each spring. Sometimes I worry that too many stories like these will be lost as time passes by, and people become too busy to slow down and visit about the old trees on the family farm, and where they came from. It sounds simple, but is being simple a bad thing? I say no.
God Bless,
