Swaying

     "I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay, watchin' the tide roll away.....I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay, wastin' time...."
                                                                    Otis Redding  1968


     If you have ever sat on a dock, on any body of water, and focused on the water, you have probably experienced the sensation that you were moving instead of the water.  There are scientific words for this, but they are not near as interesting as the phenomenon itself.

     The summer before I turned 16, Mother, her sister, her sister's husband and I took a road trip.  We drove from Illinois to Florida. I have many memories from that jaunt, but the one thing that fascinated me were the trees.....pine trees.  Not having ever traveled too much at that age and having most of my knowledge of the outside world coming from a television set, I always associated pine trees with northern climates and snow capped mountains.  I had never heard of the southern yellow pine.

     When I made the one thousand plus mile journey in a day to this new place, I was aggravated that I had driven nearly across the entire state of North Carolina in the dark.  But, in the fresh light of day, I realized that the scenery was probably pretty much the same from beginning to end.......mile after mile of tall pine trees.

     Standing on the back deck of our new 'home', I face the same direction as I did at the place I left behind.  The view I had before was wide open, with a great expanse of sky.  The view here has but a sliver of sky and a wall of southern yellow pine trees.  These trees are over one hundred feet tall.  Their needled foliage grows mostly at the top as they grapple for their fare share of sunlight.  They are straight, 'stick straight', which, of course, is why they are such a good tree for lumber and some of them grow so close together that it would be impossible to walk between them.

     When the wind blows, these southern yellow pine trees begin to dance.  They sway back and forth with the breeze, not just their lofty boughs, but the entire tree.  When I watch this grand performance, from my perch thirty feet off the ground, it is sometimes almost eerie.   More than once, I have reached out my hand to steady myself on the deck railing.  

     These trees, they bend, they sway and sometimes they break.  They are much like us, swaying through the winds of life.