Life Goes On

I am very late with my abstract this week, but here it is: What is left of one of the mighty pines felled by Hurricane Katrina. 

Ten years have passed, and the life she once knew is long over. No reaching of glorious limbs to touch the sky... Only a stump - decaying slowly over the years - remains. Yet what a stump! If one stops to look, one discovers abundant life, and surprising remnants of her former beauty. Insect life feeds on mysterious nutrients, in turn feeding birds that once lit on her branches and sang their hearts out. The woman who lives in the house, and once admired her elegant height and the swish of her gilded needles, now leans with her camera over the intricate beauty of the tree's remains.

Extra: another abstract of the stump