Let Stand

In the gray of the year to our green-hungry eyes, the pines come into their greatness.  The deciduous woods in winter have a steely and shelterless appearance, but even in a blinding snow storm pine woods have a look of warmth about them.  Alone among trees, evergreens keep up their sap in the winter; the fires of life still burn in them.  

 I like our loblolly pines for their long glittering foliage, full of warmth and light at all seasons, bringing back to me the very smell of the South, the feeling of those grand sad lowlands of Georgia and the Carolinas.  

I like the yellow pine for its generous armored trunks built up of laminated plates like the leather shields of Homeric foot soldiers.  But it is the pitch pine that you have all that was ever embodied in the name of pine - the fondness for growing on craggy ledges, the wind-molded, storm-blasted ship, the dark and pungent foliage, the tears of silvery rosin bleeding from the rough make trunk, and the clusters of cones black against the sky.  

When it dies, it dies standing. And even as a skeleton, it has grandeur.