Under longleaf pine

 When I was young, I climbed a sand ridge that rises out of the Neches River Bottom in East Texas.

It’s called Upland Island. You go from swamps and alligators, dwarf palmettos and towering cherrybark oak onto a dry, sandy ridge. On top are stands of longleaf pine. Longleaf pines grow far apart, and since light gets beneath the canopy, tall grasses surround the trees. The grasses were belt high in places, head high in others.

I sat under the pines and looked up through the branches into the sky, watching white clouds drifting. They’d formed over the Gulf of Mexico and were headed to Oklahoma.

It seemed a good way to spend a day.

The poet Pattiann Rogers wrote of a similar experience under a ponderosa pine. She said:

 

Earth and human together

form a unique being. A brief era

of immortality is lent to each

by the other.

 

I’m not sure about the brief era of immortality, but I do have a memory, one’s that surprisingly clear, surprisingly undimmed by age.

• Source: Pattiann Rogers’s poem “This Little Glade, Remember” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47642/this-little-glade-remember