We had a lot of snow last winter where I live. Insane amounts. There were too few snow-plowers to meet the demans. It was fine at first - some light snow, the plowers could do their job in the morning - but then the snowing slowly increased until they couldn't get everywhere on time so people had to drive their cars in snowbanks, basically, to get to work. Or if you were on foot, your boots, however high rise, would get filled with snow. Once you got off from work, the roads would have been cleaned, and all the snow from the roads would now be on the roadside, covering the young tree seedlings that had been planted just last summer.
The seedlings couldn't take all that weight from the snow, of course, and all of them got ripped out of the ground or snapped in half. But then there were these slightly older trees - no longer seedlings - that had had time to grow firmer roots. Particularly young birches. They still had such elastic trunks that they could bend with the weight of the snow, yet had attached themselves firmly to the soil. Their experience with the snowy winter was a lot different from that of the seedlings. You see, they weren't ripped up by the snow masses. They were merely bent under the mass in an arch their elasticity could handle.
When the winter ended and the snow started to melt from the roadsides, I sadly noticed the seedlings that had been torn into little pieces. One branch here, another there, there's a piece of the trunk. I felt discouraged.
The spring advanced, and the snow masses melted some more, revealing some of the bent trunk of the young birches. I felt even more discouraged. The tree obviously couldn't survive having been under an enormous mass of snow for that long and in such a position. I braced myself to witness the decay of the young tree once the snow would melt some more.
The spring was well underway when the last little hills of snow vanished from the roadside. But to my great surprise, the birches hadn't died or decayed in any way. They didn't even keep their deformation. In fact, the moment the amount of snow couldn't hold them down anymore, they just sprang back up, peaks reaching to the sky, as if they wanted to show the winter and the snow they had nothing on them.
And now they have bright green leaves and they sway in the summer wind and they seem to be enjoying life to the fullest. I wonder if they were just old enough to stand the adversity, and they won't have any trouble in the future, or if this one time was all they could take. I guess I'll find out next winter if it turns out has snowy as the last.
Until then I'll remember their immense perseverance.
RK
