That Small Tree

You knew in your heart it was coming. When and why you never knew, figuring out how it would happen, was also something of a mystery, but you knew it, oh yes, some day it would happen, and by some miracle of chance this photo was taken just as it started, and within a matter of a couple of days, the barn had left this earthly world, held and chewed up, fragmented into small pieces, and

swallowed down, down, down until it was gone.

The tree grew a little. Its carnivorius body was self satisfied, its head rocking with the winds of the southwest, its branches, like arms made stronger, and it quietly slipped back into its slumbering self, waiting, waiting, waiting......

Ralph Peck

Photograph by Belva Shelton

Out West, in Garvin County Oklahoma where the trees take care of buildings.