December 20, 2002
Today on my walk through town, I saw a little girl sobbing in the big old oak tree near the Catholic shrine. She had shed her coat and mittens, they lay on the ground, and she had on yellow Keds and a blue t-shirt that read: I Am the Walrus. She was pressing her face into the tree and her little chest heaved with what I first thought was cold, but then determined to be tears. Her mother was sitting at the base of the tree, fingering the roots. Suddenly, the little girl turned her face from the tree trunk and shouted "I am NOT coming down because the tree doesn't WANT me to come down! The tree says it doesn't understand WHY I have to come down, why EVERYONE always has to come down!"
Scary thing was, the mother then looked up at her, and she'd been crying too. Like she knew there was nothing she could do. Like she'd also once been someone who had climbed and not wanted to come down.