Thought I’d share a little something I wrote a while back as a wedding gift. Hope you enjoy it!
The Briar and the Birch
written January, 2011
Once upon a time there was a Briar Vine and a Birch Tree who fell in love.
The Briar Vine wound its way gently up and around the sturdy trunk of the Birch Tree, and the Birch Tree held lacy tendrils of the Briar Vine supported in its branches. Sometimes the Briar Vine’s thorns would accidentally scratch the soft and smooth bark of the Birch Tree. Sometimes the Birch Tree’s lofty height allowed the frigid wind to blow through and make the thin and delicate Briar Vine cold. They did not want these things to happen, but it was just a part of the Briar Vine being a briar, and the Birch Tree being a birch.
All the other briars and birches scoffed at them. They said these things served as proof that the relationship between the Briar Vine and the Birch Tree was not right. Briars should be with other briars and birches should be with other birches. That was just how things were done. Nevertheless, the Briar Vine and the Birch Tree were in love, and determined to make it work.
The briars and the birches continued to mock and ridicule and put down the bond between the Birch Tree and the Briar Vine. When spring came, the rains came pouring down harder than normal and the ground became marshy and muddy and soaked. The Briar Vine, held aloft from the wet by the Birch Tree, stayed safe and dry and healthy, but the other briars, all twined together along the earth, drowned and rotted and became sick with damp. The Birch Tree and the Briar Vine heard their jeers no more.
Still, the birches continued to deride and heckle and laugh at the bond between the Briar Vine and the Birch Tree. When summer came, a hoard of locusts descended and they ate their way through all the grasses and trees. The Birch Tree stayed leafy and whole because the locusts could not land with the Briar Vine’s prickly thorns wrapped all around, but the other birches became brown and stripped and nibbled to nothingness. The Briar Vine and the Birch Tree heard their taunts no more.
So the Birch Tree got scratched sometimes, but it was nothing a kiss from the Briar Vine couldn’t mend, and the Briar Vine got cold sometimes, but it was nothing an embrace from the Birch Tree couldn’t warm. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked for them, and in the end that was the only thing that mattered.
And they lived contentedly ever after.
