crape myrtle
Summer in Alabama means strong storms: lots of rain, window-shaking thunder, and forty-mile-per-hour wind gusts. I’ve learned not to be so scared of them - they’re beautiful, actually. I stand under the overhang on my porch and watch as the wind picks up. The cicadas hum and the birds call in a dissonant crescendo until suddenly, they don’t, and then lightning arcs down from the sky. The trees in my yard are tall enough to catch the high-up winds, and their branches wave and tangle together. Sometimes they fall - we have a twelve-footer hanging on our fence that we’ve left because it looks cool. After the most recent storm, the yard is littered with leafy twigs and thicker, more hearty branches. My sister’s worried the trees themselves will fall, because when the wind blows hard enough, the whole trunk sways.
I’ve never been worried about the tall trees - the hackberries are strong, and the oaks have aggressive root systems, so they’re not going anywhere. But we have two smallish crape myrtles not far from the porch that are thin and twisting. They came from the tree in our driveway - one that’s blossoms create snow-like flurries when the wind blows the right way - and its the seeds blew into potted plants and sprouted trees, and once they were big enough, we relocated them to the earth. I’ve watched them through many a storm, awed as they bent and stretched in the wind, their trunks thin enough to snap. They’re bigger now, but I still worry that they’ll break in a too-strong gust of wind.
They’re surprisingly resilient. They remind me a bit of myself - I too am thin and twisting, my spine curving laterally in two different places like the knobbly splits in the crape myrtle’s trunk. I too am worried I might snap in metaphorical strong winds, am worried I’m too thin and may be uprooted.
But I don’t. I haven’t yet. I just keep bending.
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