The end of the Telegraph Tree, Pottsville, Ar.

The last one. It's only a tree, I suppose that's why it hasn't made the news. I know how it is, these things stand around for ages, collecting dust and bugs, getting rained on, losing appendages, fighting off diseases, making it from one winter to another, soaking in the sun between naps, waking up without a complaint. Kids play around them, wagons stop, drivers have dinner beneath the towering branches. Lovers sit on blankets having picnics while the armies of ants and other insects crawl up the gnarly trunk. Year after year, home to thousands of birds, many calling it home. Squirrels, Raccoons and Opossums must have sit on the branches watching the world below. Possibly with old man Pott's hunting dog barking up the trunk.The Telegraph chattered for a time, the tree didn't care, they never do. A Civil War and World Wars have gone by and the tree stands solemnly, quietly, except for the wind through it's branches and the creaking of it's limbs. The road went from dirt with horses traveling by to asphalt and automobiles thundering past.


The tree is dead, there will be no burial, it will stand above the plaque, it's one recognition, waiting, rotting, until someone decides it time to move the corpse. Then in an instant in time, dust will be all there is, as it was and will always be.