Bony Fingered Limbs, what it really means...

So I bet a few of you are all confuzzled about my bloggy name goodness!  It's something I came up with ages ago, and was used in some poetry to describe the tree in my parent's front yard.  I still lived at home, might even have been in high school still (since I lived there maybe a total of one year past that, split into three different time frames...  before Chicago, after Chicago, and after my lease with friends was up, but before I got married.) ~


Anyway, I was talking about the tree, a Cottonwood that was planted there when the house was built, and grew up with me.  The tree was only a few months older than I was.  We climbed up it happily, and spent many hours in its branches, reading books.  We devised a bucket/basket on a rope to carry our things up and down the branches, since we couldn't really climb up with a backpack on or with things in our hands.  We sat in its branches and watched little blue eggs turn to baby robins, and brought up little water droppers to "help" the mama bird feed them.  Mama didn't even seem to mind much.


The poem that inspired the name isn't my favorite, but here it is:

February Rainstorm

Cold-kissed droplets
pelting down
leaning to the left
flying through
bony fingered limbs.
Flash of lightening
streaks the sky
in bursts of camera bulbs
taking pictures of our
"cruel cold world".
Peering through the
paint-clouded window panes
feeling the damp cold air soak in,
smiles rise from troubled skin
while music in the air,
proclaims loudly,

and 'tis true
"I'm only happy
when it rains.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've been looking for a picture of the tree in question, but may have to dig into the old hard copy photograph box to find one.  It died and was replaced by a red leafed maple a few years ago.  Color me sad.

Ah well...  The branches always looked like fingers to me, reaching out to the sky.  My favorite was when it was raining, and the branches were reaching for the drops, streaking in the light of the streetlamp, glistening happily.