The Two Trees That Are Happy Together

We continue to suspect that there is Some Thing Responsible for the evident transformation of various fauna into wooden caricatures, but sometimes it is better to Set a Challenge Aside (particularly the frightening ones), the better to recoup one's energies for another go at a decidedly more salutary moment. In any event, often the antidote to fear is, curiously enough, gratitude, for certainly there are few fears for which there is not a Greater Threat from which one is being spared. We have learned, in our fast-fleeting lifetimes, that just about anything we face could always be worse, which strikes us as one of the more useful employments of Relativity Theory.

As it happens, among the things we ourselves are most grateful for are the The Two Trees That Are Happy Together. As you can see from the photograph above, they are so much alike you would think they are identical twins, and perhaps after all this time they are. It is said, after all, that that you begin to resemble what you love (which possibility urges considerable caution in the choice of love objects).

We in the forest are certain they are an actual couple because they share the same solid base, as if all their life’s experiences together have pooled and joined them into one sturdy unit.

Everyone in the Northwest Woods wonders how they could have stayed together for so long, in such apparent peace and civility. It is indeed a very great puzzle, how happiness can be found together for more than a few years, and it is very rare, in fact, for that to happen.

The Two Trees That Are Happy Together are very modest about their success (which is perhaps another way of saying they aren’t very helpful in explaining it). They aren’t happy all the time, they cheerfully admit, and they have their share of Fractious Moments. The most they would say to account for their agreeableness is that they simply have certain jobs to do, and they do them. Each could do the jobs on his or her own, but they choose to work together. (We do think individual choice is a crucial dimension in successful relationship, as opposed to legal contract, obligation, social pressure, desperation, abject loneliness, and binding agreements in the eyes of a deity).

The Two Trees That Are Happy Together do insist that despite appearances, they really are very different from each other.

Perhaps they are, but what has struck us is that they are in every way each other’s equal: the same height, the same girth, the same straight and noble trunks.

The same quiet and thoughtful way of listening to each other.