the russian olive

this is a little bit of word painting here, trying to bring an object to life through words. i wrote it at work back in early summer while i was out rolling pipe and took notice of two kinds of trees that grow along the creek there. one is the siberian elm and the other is the russian olive, both non-native, very invasive species of tree. i was gonna do a comparison of the two, but mostly just stuck with the olive. might do the elm one day though.

the russian olive is a delicate tree, and beautiful too. they can - but rarely do - grow tall, as wild trees do, but as they are wild, they are always lacking in orderly form or good grooming. they sometimes look like a haphazardly gathered bunch of sticks jumbled among twigs stood on end, and other times like a wet, huddled dog, crouching low to the ground in fear. so it is not the form of the tree that i appreciate, but the colors and the finer details that can only be seen on close inspection; by getting close enough to see the real heart of the tree. among it's colors, one finds in the leaves a soft, creamy, ivory-green rather than the true olive-green of the fruits of spain. the bark near the base is a dark, muddied brown, like the dirt in which it makes its home, but as the limbs climb higher in their straggled, mangled form, they take on first a deep and finally a brilliant red, like amber dissolved in burgundy wine, and splashed upon the canvas that is the bark. upon the limbs, the delicate leaves seem to be barely attached, like a grasshopper grasping a blade of grass, always seeming as if the thing to which it attaches itself is never secure enough to support its weight. but for all its beauty, the helpless russian olive is nonetheless a weed, and grows wildly out of control; so it is most usually uprooted at first sight by knowing property owners.

yeah. i think it needs more, and i'm not sure that it's very useful as is, but i kinda like it.