Trees
I didn’t write anything last night! Narcolepsy won.
So here is another of my old poems.
I remember the giant old tree
In the courtyard of Trinity college
In Dublin.
It was all gnarls and moss.
It drank hundreds of gallons of water
Which would otherwise have ruined the college’s foundations.
It was clearly alive
A sage of its kind
With character all its own.
I can see how the Britons might fancy
Their trees to have spirits
If they have such trees as that.
American trees, Missouri trees especially, are
Young
Scrubby
Sweet
Weak rooted.
American trees don’t know frost or hardship.
They know small things
And think them large.
American trees are children.
They are flexible and joyous and green
And they shake their leaves in laughter
At their wise older cousins.
Fresh Hell 
I do understand you are not referring to real American trees, but to Americans themselves, Sarah, I just thought it might interest you to know that the reason your characterization of American trees as immature is because almost every last stand of old growth forest in the east has been cut over within the past 200 years. Every last stand!
What you see are second growth trees.
But my first wife once took me to a small timber of old growth in Michigan that had miraculously been preserved by a rich family for generations — ever since the first settlers. You would have found it astonishing. It was nearly as verdant as a tropical forest, the mosses especially.
And the trees were huge beyond what I could believe at the time.
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Noooooooooo! Is that why our trees are so scrubby? That’s upsetting! Those trees were our friends! I thought we just had smaller breeds of tree. 😦
In reality, I don’t actually think the old-worlders are much different from us. However, they do have a different sense of time and history than we do. Every day they touch things that are over a century old. Generations have lived and died in their houses. Here, everything we touch has been made new. Crappy plastic toys older than 60 years are labeled as antiques.
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We should go to Michigan to see the old growth forest.
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YASSS. I looked it up, apparently there two old growth/virgin places left in Missouri. It might be easiest to visit those first.
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