Aerobics

Today’s wind menaces the grass and trees outside my house like one of those over-eager male high school gym teachers working his first freshman class through a session of aerobics.  You imagine him swaggering all over the place, shoving through reluctant students, batting their skinny appendages into the proper position for exercising.  “Bend here!  One...two...three.  Flex this way!  Upright!  Down again!  One...two!”

But the trees are not near as eager to submit as the grass.  They are the rebellious students.  Students who always stand aside.  They are more than disinterested, and just stand there— “one...two...yeah, whatever”—barely swaying at all.

—Mitchell Hegman