Detail

When I stare out of our second story window into the top of our decades old juniper tree, it gets me thinking.  Thinking spurred on by my read of Robert Frost's 'Design' this morning.  It got me looking into things, deep into things.

The way a juniper tree has not needles nor leaves, but rather scaled clusters of aromatic green.  Slender reptilian fingers that offer up the dry and gray-blue berries few creatures desire.  These smallish 'berries' aren't actually berries at all, but rather cones with flesh instead of scales.  I think back to when I was younger, playing in the back yard.  "Berries are for eating, this is a berry, I'm going to eat it," I thought.  I retained a vivid memory of that taste, and of spitting it out, and of my dad telling me it was poison.  That same taste is used to flavor gin, one of my least favorite spirits.  I just now put that together...

The bark looks like its been through hell and back.  Dry, gnarled, gray and cracking.  Dead strips hang onto the living tree, life protected by death.  The tree has always grown straight.  Perhaps it was planted in a good spot, perhaps it has good tree genetics.  Our juniper tree is an athlete among juniper trees, it reaches higher than the eaves.  My vision is lacking, but I try and stare even deeper at the cone-berries.  I think of one that I cannot see, of one that is in highest bows, held close in the shade by the trunk.  Perhaps this cone-berry is infected.  The seed of the tree replaced by the seed of some parasitic insect, now a nursery for a larvae that is soon to emerge into the Spring. The larvae with so many macroscopic pieces, bug organs and bug hair, so intricately put together within its cone-berry.  Nature's attention to detail, to design.  When this bug emerges, chances are it may be instantly gobbled up by a robin or a magpie.  Flushed down through an avian intestinal tract, ending up hours later as a mostly white plop on the hood of my car that was made in South Korea.  A car that has traveled so many miles to get where it is at today, further by itself than it will ever carry me.