Once upon a time, when I was a kid, back in the last millennium, Christmas was a magic time, and the Christmas tree occupied a special place in our home. My dad always brought home the largest noble fir that could fit in the room, and that was a ten-foot tall tree. I remember lying down on my back under the tree and wondering, “How wonderful it would be to live in a Christmas tree. Dwell in a small cottage, explore the branches, and live in an enchanted world.”
Life goes on and two decades later, I am vacationing in the Sequoia National Park in California. General Grant is one of the largest trees in the world and I, like everyone else there, was gawking at this magnificent tree. The sequoias are very proportional trees and it is deceiving how normal and not so giant they look from a distance. A corral like fence encloses General Grant to prevent people from trampling on its roots, or inscribe graffiti on its bark. Not being able to walk right to the trunk, it is difficult to assess how big the tree really is. But then, I paid attention to a branch that had fallen off the tree and it was close to the fence. That branch was about five feet in diameter. I looked up and saw that it broke off from one of the main branches, a hundred feet or higher up in the tree. Judging by the size of the remaining stub, the main branch must have been a good fifteen feet across. At that moment, it dawned on me how big this tree really was. A car could have driven on that branch. Or, maybe cottages could be built on it. Wouldn’t be wonderful to have a cottage up there and live in an enchanted world of giant trees?
A story idea germinated as I was admiring the tree. However, it took another two decades before I wrote the story in 2002. The title of the original story was “The Planet of the Giant Trees.” Nine years later in 2011, I decided to publish the book, and renamed the story “Arboregal” as in Royal Giant Tree.
It took five decades to bring a story from seed to seedling to a published story. Good things take time just like the giant sequoias take time to become giant trees.
Arboregal, the Lorn Tree is available at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Arboregal-Lorn-Tree-Dumitru-Sandru/dp/0983669503/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322952105&sr=8-1
A new e-Book enhanced color edition is available at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/106244
What a great story. I enjoyed reading it as much as I am enjoying the fruit of your inspiration (Arboregal).
Thank you, Margaret! Please see my next blog about the size of the Lorn Tree.
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Thanks for starting the ball rolling with this isnight.
You’re the graeetst! JMHO
Haha, sohdlun’t you be charging for that kind of knowledge?!
When you think about it, that’s got to be the right aneswr.
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