I Am Arbutus

 

I am Arbutus, aka, the Tree of Knowledge. Look at me, I stand as I have always stood, raw, naked and unashamed. Unlike… ah but I’m getting ahead of my story.

There was this Garden, see? Oh, it was a garden of heavenly delights, the Garden of Eden, they called it. Everyone roamed around like me then, naked as the day God made them, and proud. In the way we are meant to be proud. Nothing to hide. Inside and outside made from the same cloth. Of course we hadn’t heard that turn of phrase then. We all wore skins—our own, not somebody else’s. If you get my drift.

Well, one day I was minding my own business as usual, stretching my limbs every which way to see how close I could get to Light—call it God, Sun, whatever, we just called it Light in those days. I was losing my bark as I do every spring and there was this friendly contest, see, as to who could get the best tan. Well, as far as I could see there was no contest—I always won hands down, or make it pants down, bark down, whatever, I always turned out the most brilliant chartreuse, and that was without getting at all burned. That was the rule—Eve, the woman, made it up—if the beautiful tan turned out to be a burn, you lost automatically. She made Adam the judge. Personally, I think it was a game between those two, just another excuse for touching. As if they needed one.

So I was standing there, my limbs stretched out every which way reaching toward Light and I felt this tickly sensation on my skin, something was slithering up onto one of my lower limbs. I tried to shake it off but it wouldn’t budge, it just kept crawling and crawling, up one limb and down the other till I thought I would scream. I wondered briefly if this was someone’s trick to make me lose the best tan contest that year.

Just then I heard “Pssst!” I listened.”Pssst!” I heard again.

“What?! What do you want? Can’t you tell I’m working on my tan?”

“Where are your leaves-s-s-s? I’m burning up in this hot s-s-sun!”

“They’re where they always are, I’m open, I’m the original WYSIWYG guy, I have nothing to hide. Leaves are just for decoration anyway, don’t you know that? And who are you, by the way? If I wasn’t a naturally polite guy I’d tell you to get off me, you’ll ruin my tan.”

“Well, I had this idea, s-s-see. You’re the guy they call the Tree of Knowledge, right? And I thought p-s-s-s-s-s-s…” The rest sounded like one long hiss, but I got the gist alright. No good had ever been spoken in that language.

 
“Giroff!” I shouted. “You’ve come to the wrong man, er, tree, but you don’t know me. You think that just because my body and limbs are all twisted I’ll fall in with your devious plans to separate our resident humans from each other and from their God.” I was disgusted, I was mad. I was losing good tan time. I gave myself a vigorous shake and returned to what I’d been doing, stretching way, way out…

The snake? From what I heard, he must have slithered on off to the next tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But that's a whole 'nother story. You can read it somewhere, in some bible, I heard tell. But it ain’t my story and you sure as heaven won’t find it in these pages…

©RAD 2009

Photo credits: 1st  2nd