Planting a Tree

 This week I am running a Giveaway.  The rules are simple.  Drop a comment on any of this week's postings (Saturday 3rd to Saturday 10th inclusive) and I'll put the names of all those who have commented in a hat and draw out the winner on Sunday 11th.   The winner will receive one of the books shown in my Giveaway post last Sunday.  I look forward to all your comments.

I shan't risk embarrassing the person who sent me a gift today by naming her and her husband but suffice it to say I was moved to tears. And that takes some doing. A good job Partner-who-drinks-tea is away the next couple of days or I might have been subjected to some psychotherapy. The last time she saw me in tears was when I dropped a desk on my toe!

One way or another it's been a bad few weeks with the usual health problems and 'little' things like the boiler packing up and my mobile phone going west. (Why do we talk of going west and not east? The answer can be found at a website recently brought to my attention - World Wide Words).   Sanity (or my version of it) has only been maintained thanks to the tea and sympathy of Partner-who-drinks-tea, the fun and empathy (like tea and sympathy but from too far away to make the drink itself!) of correspondence with Friend-über-special, blogging and that phenomenon so rare in England - sunshine. On Friday morning I was battling with yet another migraine and bemoaning the fact that I had only one Sumatripan tablet left to last me the next fifteen days. (My GP, probably quite rightly, rations them for fear of their side effects.)

I heard the postman. Despite the occasional bill I like hearing the postman. Especially now that there is the chance of a Postcrossing post card dropping through the letterbox. Instead today there was a parcel. It included a book, some postcards and a card indicating that a tree had been planted in my name in one of the U.S. National Forests.

When David died we planted a tree in his name on a Powys hillside in North Wales. 

We visited the area later that year - this is the hillside where David's tree was to be planted.  Isn't it a beautiful area. The land on which it was planted was being sold off in tiny lots in the hope of safeguarding it from any future building by making it necessary to buy all the different plots.  A clever idea but unlikely to succeed against a determined developer but, fortunately, it remains undeveloped and is becoming quite a good woodlandb as can be seen from the satellite picture below.

A year or so later we planted one for each of the boys in an urban country farm. Then, a few years later we were heavily involved in a joint fundraising event for the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths and the Mersey Forest which resulted in the planting of many trees in Croxteth Park, Liverpool, in memory of the children and, at the same time, raising funds for the Foundation which Partner-who-drinks-tea worked for at the time.

 
Unveiling the plaque in Croxteth Park - 1992 (that was Partner-who-drinks-tea making her speech for the Foundation and then I made one for the Groundwork Trust - an Environmental Charity of which I was company secretary - and then Richard gave me a helping hand to unveil the plaque.)

But these were all afterthoughts and not the real cause of the tears. The tears were because I was so moved at the kindness of a fellow blogger and her husband in thinking of me and making this lovely gesture. As with so many things that mean so much to us the financial outlay was irrelevant as was the effort involved (though neither might have been irrelevant to the donors, according to their circumstances).   It was the thought that counted. No one has ever planted a tree for me before and yet what better present could there be for a nature lover like myself?

So thank you. Thank you very much.