Roots- a short story

There was, one time or another, someplace that doesn’t really matter, a field along a road. It was a plain, undeveloped patch of fertile land whose road was undeveloped and lacking of buildings, signs, lamps. The dirt between the road and the field was blurred only by grass and a gutter like a moat. These acres of bare land were a barrier to a forest that grew near and crept closer by the generation. This field was owned by an old farmer who kept no plans for it, and merely let it be.

The field had more life than the eye would see at first glance, growing, living and dying by the seasons with abandon. A solitary tree sprang up in the middle, doing it’s slow dance of skyward growth, itching it’s way up over the passing years of it’s own considerable life. As a tree, of course, its life was long and it saw the throes of Earth: storms, floods, tornadoes, urban development in the distance. The land passed hands to the farmers’ children, who let it be. A solitary tree in a little field, growing tall, year after year.

Every spring when the flowers bloomed and the grass grew green, there was a particular weed that would always sprout next to the tree. The weed would reach up and up, grabbing for the same sun and sky blue sky that the tree, in the eyes of the weed, so gracefully filled. The tree’s shadow every day in the afternoon would reach it’s long fingers over the weed, blotting out the light so the little weed wouldn’t burn up when it got too hot. The weed looked up to the tree and could even say he loved her.

The tree humored the weed and told him that a weed is actually a flower which grows where it isn’t supposed to, but that he was, of course, more than welcome in the tree’s field. Every summer the weed would grow high, trying to be like the tree, giving and photosynthesizing and all the things that trees do. All the while the field passed down generation after generation, appreciating and all the things lands do in the right hands. Every year the weed would pull back down into the cold, hard earth while the tree would stay through the winter just like the trees of the forest that had, over the years, spread closer to the road.

As the forest grew closer, the tree and the weed became more distant. The weed could see it coming and in an act of desperation, for all the love that his little weed heart felt, asked the tree to marry him. The tree, in her wisdom and humility, gathered her words carefully and replied,

“No, I cannot marry you. Soon the forest will be here and I will be where I belong.”

Stunned and wounded, the weed could think of one thing only,

“But… I love you,” the weeds’ words a whisper on the wind.

“Love,” said the tree, “is not enough. I need the strong roots of another tree.”

And so it was; the weed did not ask again. The winter came and the weed hibernated and the forest grew and the field… the field was finally sold. No longer in the family, some young generation of entrepreneurs knew the little plot of land was worth something as the road had begun to be developed. Buildings came; cement and asphalt; dump trucks and bulldozers; men in hard hats with blue prints in their hands. Chainsaws and axes in tow, the workers went to war with the forest and field, pulling the trees out by their roots, digging and plowing, leveling it into a perfect lot, flat, rectangular, developed.

The tree and it’s forest were destroyed in the last winter the field knew as the corps of men turned it into a great, big parking lot. The box store came; the road became a strip-mall; people came to shop. People came, never thinking about how the parking lot used to be a field full of a different kind of life; their cars parked in neat rows, the people would walk over the little cracks in the asphalt, never pausing to consider the weeds growing up between them. But isn’t that just like weeds, always growing where you don’t want them?