Among the white tents with their canvas sides still lowered, vendors meander, their voices low. It’s a quiet, steady set-up on this Sunday morning. I’m early to church, so I use this time to watch the Stone Arch Bridge Festival preparation from a bench close to the river. A bus hisses to a stop on Hennepin and First. A train clatters by on a nearby bridge. I sip my latté.
Paella Depot, MeeMa’s Coffee, Firehouse Foods, Amish Annie Donuts, and Top Dog are the food truck names I spy from my post. I eye the things man has made and something he hasn’t. That tree, stronger than the cityscape, has seen a few festivals and runners and strollers and bikers in its years. And it doesn’t care what humans set up or take down around it. Its branches are skyward, pointing back to everything.
He is like a tree planted by the waters that sends out its roots toward the stream.
I set down my coffee and rub my arms. It’s chilly out here for me at seventy degrees. Wasn’t it supposed to hit almost ninety today? I consider the tree. What variation of temperatures does it know, standing like a sentinel by the Mississippi?
It does not fear when the heat comes, and its leaves are always green.
The people by the river scurry with their plans. They have lists to accomplish, a deadline to meet. But the festival scene drops away from my notice, and it’s back to the tree.
It does not worry in a year of drought, nor does it cease to produce fruit.
I think of my own worries, my fruit, my roots. Maybe I’m not immovable like the tree, but I can point my branches back to everything.
He is like a tree…
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