The Simple Joy of a Tree

I was looking through my thousands of photos that I have accumulated from this past year alone, and I stumbled across this one tree that just begged me to display it on the blog.

Yes, that would be an Eastern White Pine.  Tall, slender, graceful.  I thought, why not make a whole post on this tree?  The sad truth is, although I grew up surrounded by them, have a great liking for them, and consider any landscape in which they are absent to be alien and far from home, I have relatively few pictures of them.

Anyway, this fine fellow is on the south side of M 72, about five miles east of Kalkaska, though I am not really certain.  The tree sticks out quite a bit, even though the area has no shortage of taller trees.  For better illustration, here is a shot from a quarter mile back.

A single impressive pine is hardly a new photographic subject of choice, if Ansel Adams is any indicator of good taste.  The first photograph one sees upon entering the Department of the Interior's gallery, in fact, is a Sugar pine:

You see?  A photograph of a photograph of a single pine!  Now, consequently, both Eastern White and Sugar pines are five needled-pines that have strong, independent branches which are seemingly cast out into the skies as if they were an orans figure in an icon.  Perhaps their common appeal (at least to me) lies in their contradictory existence of being so grand and yet so welcoming and familiar.