ENDURANCE

I looked out the kitchen window this afternoon and saw a blob on the lawn. Immediately I thought that a bird had met some awful fate. I went out to inspect and was relieved to see a tired looking pine cone. In the far corner of my backyard I have a pine tree that has probably been on the property since the house was first built in the late 1940s. The red bellied woodpecker loves it as do the squirrels. Every fall it drops a boatload of pine cones in the yard. I hate picking them up because they are sticky, but by Spring they seem to be gone. I was amazed that this one had survived not only the twenty inches of snow that had buried it, but the cats who seem to love batting the pine cones around.