Walnut Beauty, Green Sea, and the Old One

I have stood here for almost two hundred years. I am surrounded by a sea of green punctuated with reds, blues, purples, and yellows that swim in place. My friends are mostly the bumblebees that visit the flowers, the owl family that has made me their home, and the Old One who still tends these lands. I am the only one of my kind and there is not another “beauty” like me, according to the Old One. I spend my days (and nights) surveying the green sea around me, the sky above me, and the soil, with its curious critters, beneath me. I listen to the wind, the bird songs, the chirping of crickets and peepers, and the Old One. Far out, along the edges of the green sea, there are more creatures that are similar to me, but I can barely see them. Thanks to the funny little mushrooms and their long, underground network of root-like structures, I can talk to the others. They tell me fascinating stories about creatures called foxes that I have never seen and how they live among them. They tell me about how creatures like the Old One have hurt them by cutting through them, burning them with a hotness called fire, and how some of them have even tried to drain them of their sap. I have seen a type of fire come out of the sky several times and attack this very tall shiny stick that the Old One had placed in the ground a distance from me in the green sea. Old One told me that the shiny stick should protect me from “lightening,” which is what they call the sky fire. I am thankful Old One did not want the sky fire to get me. We are the best of friends.

I have never met another creature like Old One. We have been friends for a very long time. Of course, Old One was much smaller and looked very different when they first visited me. The first time I saw them, they were running across the green sea right towards me, their eyes raining, and they uttered these sounds that made me wish I could have wrapped my branches around them. They have stayed with me every day since then. The first several nights we were together, they climbed my limbs and would sleep, cradled by my branches and covered by my leaves. I shaded them from the sun’s bright rays and covered them during times of rain from the sky. After a couple of weeks of sleeping in my branches, napping at my trunk, and wandering off to find things to eat, they began to do something most curious. They would wade out into the green sea and get down on their knees, working on something, and then struggle back to their feet holding large stones that had been buried in the green sea. They carried these large stones some distance from me and began stacking them. This went on for a long time, as the seasons changed and the sun’s rays became even hotter, and as Old One delighted in seeing that I began to fruit. Just as the Summer was winding down, Old One had completed their stacked stone creation, complete with a top made out of the green sea.

Old One began sleeping inside the stone stack, which I learned was called a “house.” They still visited me every day and often still climbed me, took naps at my trunk, and talked to me. I love listening to them talk. They tell me stories about their parents and how they are sad their parents were gone, but how they knew their parents are also still here, watching over us. They have taught me a lot about their world, which I believe is the same world that is mine, but they seem to know it differently somehow. Back then, time went on and my fruits began to fall from me and land on the ground and the green sea was now sparse and silver and brown. Old One and the other prairie creatures gathered them up and some tuck them away back to the faraway trees, some eat them right in front of me, and Old One put them in vessels woven from the green sea and put them inside their house. Old One calls them “walnuts.”

Snows and blooms and walnuts came and went and came and went over the years, ninety-two of them to be exact, and Old One and I celebrated each day together from sun-up to sun-down. As the years waned on and Old One became weathered like my bark, we both developed creaks and Old One got slower. They seemed to be brighter and spryer when the green sea was there and paler and stiffer when the sea turned silver and brown. The days between visits from my friend Old One became more and more and visits shorter and shorter, but all the lovely and insightful as ever. One day, I realised that four moons had come and gone since I last saw Old One, but the next day I heard their voice. It was like they had never left; they told me stories, recited poems, and remarked on how beautiful the sunset was each night, but I could no longer see them. They told me that it was because they were hibernating and would awake in the time of blooms and reappear.

A couple of days went by without a word from Old One and then an owl appeared. They landed on my branch and immediately began building a nest in my branches, a nest of twigs, leaves, and the green sea. I felt as though I knew this owl and watched over them as they slept their first night in their next. The owl laid a single egg in their nest and eventually, as blooms began opening again, and the green sea swayed, a little chick emerged. The chick spoke to me and said they were Old One. They had awoken from their hibernation in owl form. Now they have grown and begun an owl family of their own and we are the best of friends still. Time moves on, as it does, and Old One begins to move slower, creak more, and sleep more until one day Old One does not wake up. I think this must be hibernation and I wait. I am waiting.

What’s that?

Over there.

Running right at me,

through the green sea,

wind in their hair,

and rain pouring out of

their eyes.

They look like

an Old One.