4:41 minutes (1.88 MB)Today I went for a walk in the park. I strolled alongside a stone wall, and then over the bridge, passing accordion players and children in hats and parents and lovers and people paying for hot cider with nickels, until eventually I found a fitting observation point from where the foliage seemed to explode. I sat down against the trunk of a massive weeping tree. Literally, the thing was crying. I asked him, “what’s the matter?” and he sniffled and replied in a low guttural voice, “I’m going to die again.” Looking back on it, my immediate thought process was one of insensitivity. Judging by his size, the weeping tree was clearly pretty old and had clearly undergone its seasonal life cycle more than a few times to have become so mighty. I could only help but wonder what the fuss was about. So I asked him something like, “well you’ll be alive again in the spring, right?” to which he responded, “yea,” and I added, “so what’s all the fuss about, haven’t you done this before? I don’t see any other trees crying.” Then he asked me if I had ever seen snow. I said, “sure, I’ve seen lots of it,” and he asked me how old I was. I said 19 and he started crying again in his deep weeping tree voice, which sounded like a busted refrigerator humming in the hull of a creaky wooden ship . I tried to calm him down and he eventually did, and told me that he was 278 and he hadn’t seen a flake in 20 years. He told me that snow was the most beautiful thing in the world, and that he used to actually look forward to his yearly death, just so he could feel it on his branches for a few days or hours or minutes. Since it had been staying warmer later, he told me, the snow always came after he died, and he was afraid that he’d never feel it ever again.