leaving trees and keeping cones

there was a set of about a dozen scotch pine trees on my walk to work that hid a really ugly parking lot. they had huge needles. i would run my fingers through them on the way to and from work frequently. i would occasionally rip one off and inspect it, appreciating its smell, its texture, and its blue tint. the were relatively short, about 15 feet tall and always looked very primitive to me with their six-inch needles and inconsistent canopy. i would look at them and think of dinosaurs, or at least the renditions of their habitat that i would see in books as a kid. i have collected pinecones from them for the past couple of years, amassing about twenty or thirty that are sitting in a plastic bag in my office. i would have gotten more, but i am pretty picky when it comes to cones.

i am talking about them in the past tense because they are no longer there. just last thursday i showed up to work with sap on my hands from having pulled off one of the needles. this morning when i walked to work they were nothing but stumps. all that is there is a parking lot and a rusting, partially folded, six-foot chain link fence that was exposed by their absence.

sometimes you just never know the last time you are going to see something. i am trying to figure out if it would have been better or worse to have been told in advance that they would become acquainted with a wood-chipper over the weekend. would that have improved the quality of my last interaction with them? same thing goes for people. think about all of the people that you have never said goodbye to, knowing that you would never see them again. the most common form of this must be towards the last few days of high school and college. we all walked by each other those last few days of school and courteously acknowledged each other. in some cases we would stop and chat, in others we would walk by looking hurried so we wouldn’t have to.

life is an endless tide of changing sets and characters. it seems that you are saying goodbye infinitely more then you are welcoming the new. it comes with age. during our youths we amass a community of friends quickly and with ease. as the years follow, and your crowd thins, faces change, people gain weight, get married, have babies, and die. eventually you have are surrounded by a tight circle of carefully chosen (by yourself, by circumstance, by genetics, by fortune, and misfortune). this is not to say that those off in the wings or out of the production are any less relevant.

there is a phobia that some people have of throwing anything out. They are discovered in apartments in cities that are piled high with newspapers, dead pets, trash, busted furniture, and broken records. this is an extreme, but the idea here is relevant -- that almost everything, place, and person in life has a time that is appropriate, a time of service, a time of relevance, a time to experience and a time to be released.

if we fully acknowledged every time we part with something then our lives would be spent in a paralyzing state of loss, fear of loss, and lamentation. instead, we should just be happy that we took note of something it in the first place – and enjoy that which we reap; be it experiences, memories, orgasms, scars, children, letters, or a sense of completion. at the very least, when i go home tonight -- i’ll still have the pinecones.