We Live Among Giants

By Peter Bowden


The old trees rose, their trunks thick with years, bark rough as the hands of men who had worked the same earth for generations. They stretched toward the light, branches reaching like the fingers of a giant waking from a long, slow dream. The sun, caught in the spaces between their limbs, scattered down in fractured beams, illuminating the green canopy and painting the air in a soft, trembling light.

Beneath the trees, the air was cool, alive with the whisper of leaves that never truly stopped moving. Birds darted among the branches, shadows flickering like memories of youth, and the deep, resinous scent of sap clung to the air. The trunks, scarred and furrowed, spoke of years spent standing through storms, their roots thick and twisted, hidden beneath the moss and leaves of a dozen summers gone.

Above, the sky hinted at blue, but here, in this cathedral of leaves, the world felt smaller, closer, wrapped in the breath of the living wood. The trees swayed in a slow, ancient dance, and the sunlight wove through their limbs like the steady pulse of time, a reminder that even the oldest giants had once been small and green, reaching for light and air.

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