Love

I had every intention of putting this on a Tuesday Tidbit series of pictures - one among many.  But I thought that this was something bigger - something not tossed around lightly and then "keep moving folks, there's nothing here to see".  I think there is something to see.  Something to savor.  Something to warrant its own post.  This is big, guys. 

Background.   While hunting for Norah's cicada shells at the park where the Bushnell car show was held, I came across this tree carving.  

This post is to all the guys who have had their hearts broken.  Not just the kind that gives you that feeling of emptiness for a couple days and is filled by the next set of long legs that winks your way.  No, the kind that darkens everything you do and see not for a couple days but for a lifetime.  The kind that makes you want to shout it to everyone who can and will hear.  The kind that compels you to wander lovelorn in the park to search for the perfect tree to carve your heart's broken song for eternity, or at least as long as the tree lives. 

This is no small mission.  Besides the laws that may or may not exist for such an endeavor, one must have the right tool, the best bark, the time to devote (easy enough now that you have been cast adrift by the love of your life),  the privacy,  and the perfect poetic phrase.  

Shakespeare wrote of love's promise of "enduring and unchanging love", Poe of a love that "made even the angels jealous".  Keats wrote of love akin to the the "heaven's brightest star", and Tagore of all the "songs of every poet past and forever."  OK, so those are already taken.

How best to convey the longing of lost love for the ages, when so many of the world's great poets have covered the topic with the elegance of the ages?  Perhaps less flowery and more earthy.  And so to add to the heartstrings of the Masters, simple yet elegiac, more Midwest that Lord Byron's England, words that have sprung into every young man's damaged heart, "Your Love Was A Load Of Crap."