Covering Up

My daughter Shari sent me photos of madrone trees on Orcas Island, with their magnificent reddish bark which peels off in strips revealing a vivid green. I'm not usually a tree-hugger but I'll make an exception here. Madrone is the Spanish word for strawberry tree. And speaking of bark and those squishy things called names....      

Certain words just roll off the tongue. You have to admire them for that. Too bad diphtheria and syphilis mean what they mean. But eucalyptus is there for the taking. In my next incarnation I want dibs on that name. Tall, with a unique bark and not-from-around here. That's me.                             

My first encounter with that smell was inhaling it from the vaporizer and here I am now communing with the bent eucalyptus right outside my kitchen window. You’ve got to love its peeling trunk so striated and weary-wise in its sloughing off. What are you trying to tell me, old tree? Or is that just g'day in fluent Australian from whence you came?

The best thing about eucalyptus is that it is the opposite of apocalyptic. The tree’s name is derived from the Greek meaning good cover. Eu (good) and calyptus (cover) so named by Captain Cook for its well-protected trunk.

I’m so tired of apocalypse (no cover) in which life on this planet is left bare, wasted, done. This seems to be Trump's notion of where we are today. He has a way of projecting all the chaos of his warped mind. We are, according to Testaments, Old and New, uncovered and subject to the four beasts or horsemen or some such nonsense. Maybe Donald is one of them, as pestilence foretold.

If this is a multiple choice, I’ll hug this tree of life with its mellifluous sound. The eucalyptus tree emigrated here (undocumented) from that hemisphere below which may be a portentous messenger. I expect the next hundred years to be an epoch of mass migrations with folks in equatorial or parched regions moving to more moderate zones and everyone thirsty for water.

Let us gather in the eucalyptus grove fully covered with the truth of climate change while the MAGA folk swelter waiting for the next fabrication from their liar-denier.