DailySusan Humor Blog

DON'T KNOW JACK . . . PINES

My family will never let me live it down. We were driving in northern Minnesota past a large forest of narrowly-spaced, towering pine trees. You know the kind: tall, skinny trunks all the way up to the top 25% or so, and then dark green pine boughs up high. Makes for the kind of a dense, dark forest it’d be hard to hike through if your diet wasn’t working.

Well, I waxed rhapsodic about the beauty of that scene. “Look at Nature!” I exclaimed to my beloved and our four kids. “Look how perfect it is! The same kind of trees crowd together to make a uniform height and maximize the growing space above and underneath.”

Silence in the car. “Uh. . .” my beloved responded, finally, with great tact, “noooooo, the fact that the trees are all exactly the same height and spaced exactly that far apart is evidence that they were planted that way. It’s a tree farm.”

Silence . . . then RIOTOUS LAUGHTER!!! Mommy goofed again!!!

What made it really sting was, a few days later on a lovely wilderness golf course with emerald-green fairways cut into old woods, our third and sassiest daughter waxed rhapsodic herself:

“Look, Mom! Look how Nature just HAPPENED to conform into a beautiful 18-hole golf course here! Rolling meadows with no trees were perfect for the fairways, and small sand pits formed right next to circular meadows with the shortest grass of all! Isn’t Nature wonderful?”

Riotous laughter from the other golfers. Heyyy! Isn’t the best thing about Nature that it’s mostly QUIET?!?!