BY Cedar deArbol, Staff Writer
A tree was felled today, and it broke a little girl’s heart.
The girl blames her mother for making the decision and her father for wielding the chainsaw. The parents blame the poor landscaping decisions of previous owners.
“It’s mother nature,” claimed the girl in her teary argument. “You don’t cut down mother nature.”
Though ardent conservationists and environmentalists, the girl’s parents are baffled. “We’ve always made it clear when we go to get firewood that we only take dead or downed wood. But this is not something we’ve ever said to her,” says the father.
“We want her to learn respect for the natural world, but we’ve left out a lot of that other stuff. She needs to learn to love the world, not worry about its destruction just yet. She’ll learn a lot of that rhetoric later, probably from us. But it has no place in the life of small child,” adds mom.
The culprit turned out to be the girl’s preschool teacher. Other parents have even commented, “I came in with a plucked flower one morning and a small boy came up and started yelling at me that that was mother nature and I shouldn’t do that.”
In order to prevent the entire class from picking all of the flowers off a bush that stands next to the path to the playground, the teachers have impresed upon the children that the flowers are part of mother nature and need to be left for other people to enjoy.
The tree, a northern white cedar, was chopped down while the little girl was napping. Even though it provided little to no shade for the house it stood next too, the girl was heart-broken to find it missing when she awoke.
The girl’s mother is disturbed because she could come up with no good arguments to counter her daughter’s request not to cut the tree down, except for the parents joint decision to widen the existing stairway leading from the deck to the yard.
The father is convinced that his daughter will never forgive him for dealing the death blow to her favorite tree. He says he is awaiting the bill from her therapist.
