Dying Trees

There was a time in my life when it seemed that everywhere I moved we had big trees in the yard, and every yard had at least one large tree that died while we lived there. It was so prevalent that I started asking myself, "What is it with the dying trees?" A statistic about the trees that I felt MUST be significant was that in each yard, the deaths became more dramatic in successive order.

In our yard in Georgia, the loss of the beautiful turkey oak was eventful because the oak was the center piece of our front yard. I had planted several holly around it shortly after we moved there, but the deer took them to the ground in one breakfast gathering, so I circled it with azaleas. It died slowly, and I think it suffered.

In the back yard of Live Oak Blvd in St. Cloud, our tree death was dramatic due to the remarkably rapid decline of the live oak I viewed every morning out of my kitchen window. It was not a giant tree, maybe fifteen or twenty years old, but it was a fine tree, and that tree died as if someone placed an instant curse upon it. ZAP! and it was dead. I just couldn't believe how fast that tree declined. It was almost Biblical in nature.

The final tree death in the family was the GIANT live oak in the backyard of where we now live. It drew us to the place our house now sits because it sprawled across the entire back of our property with majesty. After our first year in the house, it began to look lackluster. It soon lost leaves out of season. Then, even worse, its leaves clung to it and began to brown when they should have fallen to the ground. We had several people try to save our tree. We put little pots of medicine up and down its fat trunk; we prayed; we fertilized; we agonized, but the tree died.

I have another tree in my present front yard that almost died, too, soon after the demise of the giant oak, but it didn't. The tables have turned just like the spring maples.

In the morning, when he returned to the city, he was hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the side of the road, he went to it and found nothing at all on it but leaves. Then he said to it, "May no fruit ever come from you again!" When the disciples saw it, they were amazed, saying, "How did the fig tree wither at once?" Jesus answered them, "Truly, I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, 'Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,' it will be done. Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive. Matthew 21: 18-22

Peace.

Love, Linda