The Dogwood Won’t Die

This particular dogwood tree is pretty old as dogwoods go, but it refuses to die. In recent years, it has shed rotten limbs in spring and summer thunderstorms, autumn hurricanes, winter nor’easters, and bled orange mucous which became a fungal farm for weeks, after each splintered branch-stump was trimmed by chainsaw.

It now has not one, but multiple holes in its heart, and yet it blooms in spring and mingles up in our modest, deciduous “canopy” with the neighboring oak trees as if nothing’s wrong. It’s an amazing, tenacious, living thing, this old dogwood tree!