Lake Lewisia #584

Rejoice, rejoice, for Autumn at last walks among us again, trailing brittle leaves and petrichor in her wake! In every sprouting mushroom, in every fading flower, in the scudding clouds and the yellowing moon, see the reminders that everything falls before it rises again in its time. We make our way best in humus, in places where others have gone before and made way with their struggles, and we in turn will dig in our roots amid the knowledge that other, undreamt-of things will be able to grow long after Autumn reaps us in.

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LL#584

Today's Keyboard Smash

I don't know as there's any great need for spoiler warnings, but: I'm going to talk about one of the end bits of Return of the King, if that's something you don't want to know about yet.

There's an episode of some crime drama--I'm inclined to think it was Criminal Minds--where multiple children have been kidnapped and kept for years. One mother hopes, when the case is cracked, to be united with her son after something like a decade, only to find out he was killed by the kidnappers a few days before rescue came. It's profoundly tragic, that such a terrible thing could happen when otherwise happy conclusions are so close at hand.

That's what came to mind when listening to the hobbits return to the Shire to find it controlled and partly destroyed by Saruman in his exile. The war has otherwise left the lands of the hobbits alone, as so much of history has before. But here at the end, when everything else seems set to rights, the four return to find buildings burned and trees cut down.

The trees, more than anything, broke my heart. The reckoning of Sam that it would take generations after him to see the trees regrown and, as he puts it, the Shire looking as it ought to. I can always be counted on to get over-emotional about trees, after all.

So it was with commensurate joy that I learned what Galadriel's gift to Sam had been, the box he carried: a seed of the fantastical elvish trees in Lorien and mysterious dust that let trees grow twenty years' worth in a single year. A gardener's gift.

When I think of my mortality, if I assume I at least outlive my family and so don't have them to worry about, my anxiety is about the trees. Have I planted them early enough that I will get to see them, tall and lush and in their full glory? How many more will I have time to plant? Who will there be after me to look out for them and make sure no strangers come and cut them down as inconvenient.

That's what happened at my old home, as we scrambled to pack the last of our belongings and get out now that it had been bought and the money secured for a new home. The new owner cut down some of my best-loved trees, simply because they were inconvenient or insufficiently grand or some other petty aesthetic failing. In the absence of a stout sword and a chance for vengeance, I would take Sam's box and the chance to grow more trees up quick and strong where I could enjoy them with the time I may have.