Seasons Of Love

When Lindsay Anne fell in love with a tree, it was quite a curious incident.

See, if you knew Lindsay Anne, you knew that she fell in love too easily. But she was not always interested in trees as this interest came after many years of losing love with men or boys or boys that acted like men or men that acted like men or both.

Her first love, Michael Alexander Mcaukee, the neighbor boy that canned his own night-crawler collection in his father's garage, was where it began. She played with him after school and one time when they were coloring in encyclopedias that children should not be coloring in, she looked at him still holding the green crayon (her favorite color and the color of Michael Alexander Mcaukee's eyes) and kissed him. He pulled his lips away and told her he was a monster who could eat her and began biting her arms and so she ran out of his house swearing off Michael Alexander Mcaukee and any boys that had green eyes.

Thomas Lewis Larkenson had blue eyes and wore sweater vests that his mother picked out for him. But most of all he had fantastic tough legs. Lindsay Anne adored this about him, that his mother picked out his clothing and that he had legs that looked like they could dance for all hours, and asked him to her first formal dance while they stood in line in the cafeteria and spooned both themselves faded and sick looking creamed corn. When he was about to pay with all dimes, Lindsay Anne looked at him grabbed his spork holding hand and asked if he would take her to that weekend's high school dance. He responded with a silent nod. And later, on that weekend, did not show up to take her to the dance. And Lindsay Anne did not feel like dancing alone to Cyndi Lauper and music kids danced to at that time.

Lindsay Anne then swore off boys that had legs.

Finding boys who did not have legs was something of a nuisance because legs were something pretty much anyone had. And since she had also sworn of boys with green eyes and legs this was limiting to her selection for her first date in college.

Carl Timothy Henderson was in a car accident when he was sixteen years old. Lindsay Anne knows this as she asked him why he was in a wheelchair without legs and that was the response that Carl Timothy gave her. Then, when he looked at her she realized that he had deep brown eyes that were nothing close to green and then, and only then, she knew that she was in love.

It actually went OK for Lindsay Anne and Carl Timothy. For an entire two months Lindsay Anne pushed Carl Timothy's chair in to his classrooms and bent her back forward when she wanted to lean down to kiss him. She looked like she was bowing when she would do this and could hear applause in her ears. She imagined it was cupid giving her a hand for finding love.

Carl Timothy was a good kisser and was going to college to be a teacher. Lindsay Anne always loved teachers and loved a man that had no legs and not green eyes but had a brilliant mind and was also brilliant with sex (since by now sex was something Lindsay Anne was very OK with if it was with the right guy). But, of course, Lindsay Anne found out (on a very overcast day) that Carl Timothy was really in love with Steven Walter Richardson and she found this out because of the first night when they had just come back from the college cinema and saw Rocky Horror Picture Show together, she tried to put her hand down his pants as she had always known he had at least a penis down there. But instead of him enjoying this, he used his hand to grab her hand and told her he was hoping they could just be friends. When she asked why, he looked at her with his chocolate eyes and said that he wanted a boyfriend and not a girlfriend.

Lindsay Anne then swore off men with penises.

If you know anything at all, you know that a penis is what makes a man a man. And Lindsay Anne did not like women (in that way) and knew that her love and all the love she could give would have two choices. She was either to kill all this love she was filled with and try to defer it in to ceramic pottery classes at the local recreation center and buy a lot of cats and try to love cats the same way you can love a man—with out sex of course because if she swore off penises she was not going to have sex anyway.

Or she was to use her love blindly and follow her heart.

She decided the later and fell in love with a tree.

There was no particular reason, really, she just always had liked the way trees looked--safe, strong, and rugged like a good man. She fell in love with the tree that grew in the front yard of her apartment building. It looked like a hand growing from the soil. The branches drew themselves a pattern like breaking ice in the sky. It was a feeling she got. She knew she loved it the moment she walked up to its thick skin of bark and used her finger tips to get her hand to its roughness. When she leaned in to smell the trunk of the tree she realized that this tree had nothing: No eye color. No Legs. No Penis. And that this tree was safer than any man she had ever taken the chance to know. The tree would never love another man. The tree would not taste her breath after a kiss and tell her to brush her teeth. The tree would never give its phone number to another. This tree, unlike all the boys she ever loved, would be predictable and always there for her and never ever surprise her with things she did not want to be surprised with. Or though she thought.

This tree would change in the seasons and be predictable because seasons are predictable and predictability was safe to Lindsay Anne.

Lindsay Anne told no one about her tree. And on a very lovely summer warm day when life was hard, she decided she would live in the tree. She knew this was the best. And this is what she did: She climbed that tree with a blanket, a bottle of water she had filled from the tap, and an apple. She ate the apple and sipped the water and wrapped herself in the blanket. She sighed often as that is what people do when they are in love. Sigh in happiness. All summer long.

But in life, like with boys, there are changes...or for a tree, there are seasons. And winter came...and the tree began to change something she least expected. She realized that the tree was becoming cold and dead-like and did not gently show her its moves like it did in a warm breeze in summer…but whipped her around aggressively to the ice cold winds of winter until she fell out of the tree. The tree did not know any better, as this is what trees do. But Lindsay Anne would have none of it…

And told the tree she was leaving it, for good.

Lindsay Anne moved out of the tree after the first snow fall. She left the tree to continue moving and growing and sitting in the front yard of her apartment in the city with out. She would go out the backdoor of her apartment, as it was too painful to see the tree she used to live in. She realized what it meant to know somethings are not meant to work out, as it is easier to see this when you are in control. And that is OK.