Of the three of us only I am in the living world. I was but a boy of four or five years old when I fell in love with the Old Pear Tree. My Grandma and I would go to pick the fruit from the tree. Grandma would lift me up to the lower branches and I would pick the pears and throw the fruit of the small twisted tree down to my Grandma to be caught in her apron. Grandma would tell me the tree belonged to the two of us and that we belonged to the tree. We loved the tree and the tree loved us. Then Grandma died and only the tree and I remained. Then my Aunt and Uncle moved out to the farm and my Uncle thought the Old Pear Tree was ugly and wanted to cut it down.
My Mother and I told him no. He cut the Old Pear Tree down anyway. He had no right to do so.
He believed in perfection. In perfect green lawns, perfect trees and he told perfect lies.
He could not see the beauty in that Old Pear Tree. My Uncle Jim has my pity and my forgiveness for killing a friend. He didn't know any better. No one had taught him how to see beauty.
I went to the tree stump and said goodbye to my old friend. I went home and cried myself to sleep. My Uncle pulled the tree stump up and burned it as he had burned the rest of the Old Pear Tree in the farm house's fire place.
I thought he had destroyed the Old Pear Tree but I was wrong. The Old Pear Tree lives on in my heart and mind. It will live forever in the stories that I write now and in the future.
2 comments:
i like the story very very much although it's a kind of parabel from which one may have heard from before maybe in another context.
who have taught you how to see beauty?? i'm still thinking about it and asking myself who taught me or was IT was which have made me sensitized and cannot find a true or one (only) reason..
The story is true but as a small child I was being taught to love nature and to see beauty where other could not find beauty. I'm sure you've heard stories like this one before because I believe this is a universal story.
Everyone I've ever meet has taught me how to see beauty. I was born with a quiet imagination and a love of nature. My Grandparents with my Father and Mother taught me to see beauty in all things.
My Uncle Jim cut down the Pear Tree but there is beauty in him. When everyone on his side of the family turned there back on his oldest Grandson he was their for the boy in his darkest hour. In that moment my Uncle Jim was full of inner beauty.
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