And I have watched
your fruit ripen and fall, to be eagerly seized by the wild folk of
the woodland and stored, some of it in the holes of your own trunk,
for use during the long winter. You taught me to be generous and they
gave me lessons in forethought and frugality. Later in the autumn I
have watched your green leaves take on a wondrous wine-red beauty, as
the splendor of a soul sometimes shines most vividly in the hour
before it is called home; and they taught me not to grieve or to
murmur because death must come to us all. In the winter I have seen
the squirrel digging beneath the snow to find the acorns he had
planted in the fall. He didn't find them all; some of them came up in
the springtime as tiny trees and spoke to me of the life that knows no
end."
* * * * *
Now a woodchuck, fat from a summer's feeding, climbs heavily to a tree
stump and seats himself to pass the morning in his favorite avocation
of doing nothing. He worked during the night or the very early
morning, for fresh dirt lay at the entrance to his hole. Evidently he
had been enlarging it for the winter. Like a Plato at his philosophies
he sits now, slowly moving his head from side to side, as if steeping
his senses in the beauty of the world around him so that all the
dreams of his long winter sleep shall be pleasant.
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