It is a mystery to me why exactly I have an infatuation with trees. But I do. And I just accept it. Today as I was out for some afternoon PT, one of my favorite species of trees was in bloom: sycamores. Their bark is the subject of treehounds and poets. Robert Frost wrote not only of birches in New England, you remember.

As I got the miles in, I stopped more than a few times under the sycamores that ran parallel to the stream. I smelled the meadow, too, freshly mowed by tractors. A hawk was in the middle of the meadow, wigs beating as he pierced his catch with his black aquiline beak in regular bloody dips, like a murderous pumpjack. I could see the bloody veined viscera of the field mouse.

When I gazed up again and again through the limbs of the sycamores and up into the sky, I was not an old man for a few moments but rather a boy again in my small town where I spent much of my adolescence, at Grandma and Granddaddy’s place, where a giant sycamore grew massive and seemingly forever, and where it was surrounded by azaleas and monkey grass Granddaddy had planted, and behind the house were his pear trees and the garden, and scuppernong vines, and a massive red oak under which he parked his 1968 shortbed Ford with a 3-speed on the column.

I was back there. All at once. Just by standing under the sycamore trees today that ran along the stream. Back to where it all began in so many ways–in ways that money cannot purchase, in ways where God speaks to tender-souled boys who love trees, those who planted them, and those who sowed seeds of love.