My Choice (Part 2 of 5)

I came here with my companions from the nursery.  We were tightly packed in a box, agitated and worried about what might be happening.  Out of the ground and out of the wind, our chatterings were muted.  I didn’t have to wait long before a human grabbed me by my branches and pushed me into a hole in the soil and covered up my roots.   Soon I was spreading them out, anchoring myself to the earth and feeding from the goodness there.  After this initial shock, I settled, stretched out my branches with my shiny green needles and grew up towards the sky.

As the days grew longer and then shorter again, I kept growing.  The hillside was a good place and we experienced all the weathers.  It was sunny sometimes and was never too hot for long; it rained sometimes and it always stopped; it snowed occasionally and made my branches heavy but it soon melted; it was often windy and that kept us flexible.  Every so often, someone would come with a machine which threw some white stuff onto the ground where it melted and made me strong.  Sometimes people would come and trim our branches so that we could grow straighter.  They weren’t paying attention when they came to me and trimmed my main stem at the top accidentally.  I grew three others in its place.  So, compared to the others, I was less than perfect.