How well I remember as a child climbing trees. Always scared the higher I climbed but always looking at the next large bough and wondering what it would feel like to sit on it and how far I would be able to see. Then gripping it tightly as if my life depended upon it when a breeze hit and the tree swayed and looking down thinking the ground was far too far away.
It would not have meant much to me that they were Quercus, Fagus or Fraxinus, I knew the leaves, I responded to something embracing in the forms. I was to write a series of poems about trees when I grew older ( http://ruralists.com/features/beechtree/index.html) but as a child I always looked for the trees when we moved. Somehow they made me feel nothing much had changed. People’s faces, streets, names but not the trees.
I am fifty next week and I intend to do what I have continued to do all my life, climb a tree. Look at the view. Worry my dogs who will sit by the trunk looking up wondering how they can join me. And I will be standing amidst 150 years, wrapped up in the bare boughs of an oak, beech or ash. And I will be celebrating.