Getting unbent

Soon after we moved here, we began buying bundles of seedling trees from the Conservation Department and the Arbor Day Foundation. Some of them survived, among them this pine tree. The winters here are always notable for ice storms, but there was an especially bad one 3 years ago during which many trees were damaged.

During this storm, this pine tree was bent almost horizontal by the weight of the ice and stayed bent over for several days before the ice finally melted.

We considered it a miracle that it didn’t snap or become uprooted.

It gradually began to straighten – not helped a bit by ice storms in the succeeding two winters and another bad one this past winter.

It has managed to almost – not quite – but almost become upright again.

In the meantime, the needles on the limbs started pointing in the wrong direction...


and now that the tree is almost vertical they look sort of odd. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the needles to point the right way.

I think there is probably a life-lesson to be learned from this tree. I know some people that are somewhat bent because of things that have happened in their lives. Sometimes we truly do get weighted down by the burdens in life and some of us never really recovered. I am going to try very hard not to become bent and pointing in the wrong direction myself.