Leaf Me Alone

 

  I listen to them. They say I'm beautiful when it gets cold. They love my red color, but they complain when all the red falls off and they have to rake it up. No one says it's beautiful when one of them loses the stuff on top. 'Hair' they call it. The two-trunks are disgusting creatures.
  After I'm bald, they go around and drive tubes into my bark and catch my sap in buckets. Oh, the pain! The oak told me they boil down the sap and eat it on pancakes (whatever that is). Revolting.
  None of them will allow another two-trunk to drive tubes into their bark and collect their red sap in buckets. 'Blood' they call it. Although the dogwood told me he heard some of them talking about a movie (whatever that is) where the two-trunks did that to each other and laughed about it. Disgusting creatures! I wish I had been planted somewhere far away from these lunatics.
  The oak told me when I die, I won't go to two-trunk heaven (whatever that is) but to the lumber mill. 'Hardwood floors' they call it. What an insult to my beauty. I feel safe in saying the trees will still be around long after the disgusting two-trunks. No creature so revolting can possibly survive its own stupidity.
  The next time you see a bald two-trunk eating pancakes, think of me.

Lighthouse Keeper

  It's 387 steps to the top. I know this because I'd counted them every evening at twilight for fourteen years. I could get to the top in my sleep. In 2006, they installed a switch at the bottom of the stairs. Then I only had to climb once a week to clean the windows or change the bulbs.
  Natalie left in '07 and took Gemma with her. She said it was too isolated and no place to raise a child, that Gemma needed other children to play with. I stayed.
  In '08 the hurricane took out most of the beach. I rode out the storm in the lighthouse tower. The generator needed tending, of course. It was my duty. The light stayed on for forty-eight hours straight. The governor thanked me in person for my diligence. The state even gave me a raise.
  Gemma graduated high school last year. She asked if she could come live with me. She said she missed the solitude and the beach and me. Mostly me. She met a surfer I don't approve of, but he's opening a T-shirt shop on the boardwalk. I guess I could learn to like him if it means Gemma stays on the island.
  Last week my left knee gave out on the seventy-eighth step. I had to descend the rest of the way on my bottom, like a toddler. "Knee replacement," the doctor said. "No more stairs."
  I'm too young to retire.

(I thought this fit well on a hurricane weekend with Joaquin passing by the coast of NC.)