My dear fellow bloggers, I give you —Dick, the tree.

Dick is a grand old aspen. He stands proudly deep in the forest at the cabin. Like an old cowboy who’s been riding the range on his horse too long, his legs are bent in a permanent bow. His stance is a jaunty one with one leg slightly more forward and more bent than the other. You can almost hear him greeting you with a howdy pardner!

Dick is so named because of a strategically placed twig, which over the almost 20 years that we have known him, is not quite as obvious as it was back when we first met him. It happens to the best of us. Age has a way of wearing us down over time.

Dick is a strange one. We can’t quite figure out how he came to be. There are two separate trunks coming up from the ground which turn into one. It doesn’t happen at the ground like there was one tree that got split somehow. So, another tree falling on Dick and him growing around the fallen tree doesn’t make sense either, because how could two parts of a tree join back up together so perfectly? But the only other scenario would be two independent trees joining up together, and could that really happen?

Yet in this close-up shot, it look like there is a definite seam, doesn’t it? Go ahead, don’t be shy; take a closer look, Dick won’t mind you staring at his private parts.

Here is Dick, from ...ahem, ehr… behind.

No matter which direction you view Dick from, he’s a strange fellow. We have great affection for Dick and visit him every time we go to the cabin just to be sure he’s still standing. Dick’s stomping grounds are in an area of the forest we call “the blow-down” because there are so many downed trees from the wind. So far, so good. We figure his two-trunked hold on the ground is pretty darn stable. At least we hope so. If Dick ever gets back on his horse and rides off into the sunset, the forest will never be the same.