Weekly Photo Challenge: Waiting

These men are waiting. They may look like they are quite active, but I know them. One is 80 years old, and the other is not far behind him. They devote their days to making improvements they will never enjoy, such as planting trees on Arbor Day.

They do enjoy much of it, though. The ability to move about and act like men, still, free of huge medical problems, they enjoy. The camaraderie with other men who care about the future of our grandkids and great-grandkids, they enjoy. Rising early and dressing for work, like the good old days, they enjoy. They are real men, more so than some of their self-professed more virile co-males on this planet, who still lie abed at 10:30 a.m.

They gave up waiting for them.

The tree around which they just finished firming the soil is also waiting. The soil, the men discovered, was moist only down to about 8 inches.  On this overcast morning, everyone is hoping for rain. It does fall, 1/2 inch that night and 4 inches the next couple of days. In tree-years, it did not have to wait long.

The tree also is waiting for spring, to show off its promised beauty and to grow into the new soil around its roots. It is waiting to increase enough in size to shade the walking trail just beyond it. And someday, it will have waited until, like the men who planted it, the end will be very near and it will be ready for a position on a truck similar to the one parked in the background.

That truck also is waiting for someone who lives nearby to get going on this mid-morning. Is he lazy? Does he have the day off? Is he bound by a schedule that will not allow him to deliver his load until later?

Or is the driver also waiting? Did his wife sleep in and forget to make breakfast? Is he waiting for an important phone call before he begins his day? Is he waiting for the dryer to stop tumbling so he can finish dressing?

How inter-connected we all are! How much one slow one can affect it all!