🥔 TREE 643: This kid sees a tree
If you haven’t, please take a minute and read ‘What I talk about when I talk about God’.
L A W R E N C E × J E F F
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So this French kid – he’s 18, supposed to be a man. He doesn’t feel like a man. What does being a man even feel like? This kid’s sitting out on the back step under a grey sky eating a boiled potato. (I don’t know if they had potatoes in 17th century France, but that’s what he’s eating.) He doesn’t mean to drop bits of potato on his uniform. He doesn’t mean to to smear the bits that he drops into his too-short jacket. He didn’t mean to drop the plate full of dinner on Madam Fieubert’s shoulder. Or trip over the dog and pull down the curtains. He means to be a good servant in a tidy uniform who earns, now and again, a quiet nod of recognition for a job well done. Instead he has the wrong body for a uniform, the wrong shape for serving in a house. He’s all angles that poke into ribs and bounce off walls and step on the wrong parts of the stairs. That’s why he’s outside in the January wind:
generally, because he doesn’t fit
specifically, because of the dinner on Madam Fieubert and the bollocking that came after.
He’s not too upset. It was a normal bollocking with minimal violence. But he’s not happy. He doesn’t fit here. Before here, he didn’t fit in the army, injured himself out before he was properly in. When was the last time he felt like he fit somewhere? Probably when he was still small enough for his mum to carry him. Before he grew all the angles.
So the kid’s sitting there on the step, not fitting, not too upset, just sitting, wishing he had another potato, when he looks across the yard at a cherry tree, a winter skeleton of a cherry tree, and a thought hits him:
That tree’s gonna be just fine.
In a few months, it’ll be all flowers, then leaves, then cherries and the birds will steal most of them, then the leaves will fall off and it’ll be a skeleton again. And that tree is gonna be completely fine the whole way through.
Another thought drops in behind the first one:
If that tree, which does absolutely bugger-all besides being a tree, and God doesn’t seem to mind it taking up space and God gives it flowers and fruits and birds, maybe there’s a space for me somewhere?
Ben knows he needs to shave, but he’s paralysed by choice. Which razor subscription service is the best for for an ageing, slightly out of shape but definitely still cool millennial bluegill?
Grow slowly
Jeff