The Look of Trees in Winter

I think of the tree in Narnia, something that A. wrote on in an earlier rendition of this group.  The tree that became the Wardrobe, the looking-glass to another world.  The fawn, Mr. Tumnus, with his sparkling eyes and cowering shuffle.  Did the siblings-turned-royals save him?  Did he survive the Troublesome Times?  I wonder about these times, how the trees have scabies - beetle infestations - and how they still stand tall.  A friend of mine traveled to Humboldt County to be among the trees in August - she wants to be buried there, under a tall, majestic redwood who has withstood the centuries.  It's comforting to think about - some of the Giant Sequoias up north near the coast cling to their mist, grow strong, mother entire ecosystems that we short humans are still discovering.  Some of them have been around in the B.C. period - before Jesus, before the Dark Ages even though there was food and music and life during those times as ever, before and through the many conflicts, conquests, and wars that have scoured our earth over and over again.  

One of poems that has journeyed with me through this life is Walt Whitman's Reconciliation -  Word over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:

I see this world soiled again, sullied, and I don't know who will come back to it to clean it.  And words, they're symbols with meaning.  Even though my dad thought words last forever, and they do in memory I suppose, I don't know how eternal they are.  Especially opusues.  I see people's magnum opuses at Dollar Tree for a buck, marked for so much more.  It's democratic in a way, the John Green and David Levithan stories tucked away at the cusp of a hill before its descent into Jackson, beside the white churches and the oaks-becoming-pines.  Words get out, they get everywhere, they're viral things that can infect or purify.  And those trees - those trees are the clean sheets that we are able to tuck into night after night after night.