Charlie Brown

We are in the middle of March Madness, and I don't mean basketball. A few days ago we had 50 degree temperatures, and today we have 2 inches of snow. While it is beautiful, it is beginning to wear on my nerves as there are so many things I just have an itch to do. However, I do digress, I want you to meet Charlie Brown. My daughter in law and the grandchildren wanted a pine tree just like Charlies Browns Christmas Tree, kinda scraggly, bare, looking like it needed a home somewhere. to plant in their front yard. This was when we still lived in the city and I was unaware of the powerful forces of nature. We used to come out to what would eventually be our homestead on a regular basis, just to see what was growing. One day on an excursion to escape the city, we saw Charlie Brown, on the steep hillside along the path that was one day to become our driveway. He was all by himself, struggling against the wind that is so prevalent here. There was huge rocks to his left, and brown prairies grasses to his right, and tall popples and birch trees kept the sun away from his branches, and so he was barely two feet tall, a perfect picture of what they wanted. Out came the shovels, burlap bag, and soon he was firmly tucked into his carrying case for the venture south.



Five hours later Charlie Brown arrived at his destination, on a corner lot in the city, ready to face the tide of cars, trucks, bikes, and people. Firmly implanted with the utmost care and love, he faced at least three winters of salt spraying, from the winter city trucks, fumes from the large trucks, traffic on busy street, and the hassles of sparrows and squirrels climbing his fragile tree trunk in hopes of finding a tidbit here and there to eat. The children mowed the lawn to perfection, manicuring every corner, planting strategically placed flower beds adding color to the city landscape for the summer and played hopscotch on the busy sidewalk. However, something had happened to Charlie, and he stopped growing, the pine needles didn't fall, he didn't wither away, he just stopped growing, something was very wrong in the heart of what should have been a very strong pine. So it was with much regret, out came the shovels, into the burlap bag he made his way back home.



By this time we had moved from the city, built our pole shed house and were on our way to becoming homesteaders in this lonely quiet country. We picked one corner of our lawn, overlooking our garden, to the right, and overseeing the goat yard to the left, and settled him in, not expecting much if at all to happen. By this time he was a little over three feet, still sparsely branched, looking almost as he did when he had made the journey south, not much had changed. It was spring time, the mud had settled, the garden was being tilled, so we didn't give him much thought till one fall day, I looked through the window, and there was Charlie Brown, he had grown a foot, sprouted some new branches, and standing tall. Charlie Brown was back home, where he had sprouted from a tiny seed, on the far hillside, done some traveling, and like most of us as we get older and have seen the world, came back home. He survived a goat mangling when one of the kids escaped the fenced yard, and decided one of his branches was pretty tasty, the use of my big whites, (German Shepard dogs) as a fire hydrant....hence the fence around the bottom, and is now well over 12 foot tall, heading for the sky. He sheds his needles in the fall, adds pine cones in the spring, and is companion to the many birds that head his way. Charlie Brown is home, and I wonder, maybe I am too.