Just a Baby

We were free to scale the fruit and nut trees, the sugar maples, the ash and beech And we did, playing, “I see you first,” from among the branches But Grandma warned with watchful scowl Just daring that we try disturb the new tree, the forbidden tree… Just one small tree, alone in the front yard, separated from the hundreds of fat, green spires; its newness and purple leaves tempting eager eyes. “It’s just a baby,” Grandma would say, each time one of us admired the branches… Taller than our parents, but just a baby; and we imagined that by next year it would be a giant, a perfect climbing tree… but next year came, as did the next, only a little taller and more skinny branches, Grandma still chided, “It’s just a baby.” It’s not a baby anymore, but we no longer climb trees. Instead, we sit with the rest of the grownups beneath the still forbidden tree and our children climb the same trees we climbed when we were just babies. Our loyalties lie in those roots, in the changing of the leaves of time; time that passed too slowly while we were young and too fast now that our shared childhood days are gone.