EDIT: Forgot to say that the comment-issue has been fixed. I typically use various anon-thingies and google thought I was a spambot, it happened in 2009 as well. Problem fixed for the moment. Sorry for late replies!
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The tree-women's folly
The tree-women left the tree-men in their forests, they went farther and farther away from their husbands, following the butterflies and the beautiful flowers that sprouted up around them and which they took such great care not to trample. Not a single flower was crushed under their lumbering yet ever-so delicate roots. The tree-women cared more for blossoming flowers and beautiful little plants than boring forests. It was they who had first discovered the amazing flowers, butterflies and weird tree-like plants coloured like the rainbow. Where it all came from, they did not know, but they all loved them far more than the simple, white little flowers that grew in their husbands' forests.
The tree-women kept following the trail of flowers, caring for them, watering them and enjoying the different colours and scents. They followed the ever-growing trail of plants, walking and walking until they finally found a valley filled with all sorts of strange, nectar-filled flowers, bountiful in flies and strange bee-like insects which made sure the flowers would return the next spring, and the next and so on until eternity - or so did the tree-women believe. It was obvious that they had found the home of the strange, beautiful flowers which gave the tree-women such joy, and they settled there, despite their husbands' meek protests: We need to be together, raising saplings, we need not only joy but also work and hardships in the forest, so that a healthy forest can grow for us to live in, and for the animals to live in and especially for our saplings to grow in and into...
All the tree-women sighed wistfully over the boring tree-men who knew nothing of true beauty, of the wild colours and tempting scents of their valley - it was as if the boring tree-men were dead trunks themselves, they said to each other, smiling and throwing petals around them until they were too tired to take care of the strange flowers. Which never really seemed to be a problem because the flowers grew and grew and grew and spread faster than any plant. The tree-women could rest, drink water and stand under waterfalls, drizzled in cool water all day while the flowers did most of the work themselves.
The tree-men visited once in a while, never really allowed into the deepest part of the valley gardens, because the tree-women had finally found something they thought themselves better than their husbands at doing: Their gardens were huge, heavy and filled with strange scents. With near-to-no effort, the tree-women could make a rock come to life with plants and yellow nectar, and the tree-women did not want the tree-men to see how easily this was done; in essence, the plants nurtured themselves after very little effort from the tree-women, but the tree-women were too proud to confess to their husbands how easy it had been to build their fantastic gardens. Besides, they said, what do we need our husbands for - all we need to eat, all the shelter we need, and most importantly: All the joy and beauty we need is all around us without us doing anything!
After a while some flowers turned back to boring green, some of them started emitting queer smells and when the first tree-woman noticed how the green flowers had started flowering upon her own bark-like skin, she was seen as an especially good tree-woman, and not as an omen of bad times coming.
Obviously, the tree-women, allowed by their weak husbands to go too far from their forests, had been lured by Nature itself, to go not the way of compromise, of subservience, of trust and of tradition, but rather, just following their own feelings, of just going with what felt right at the moment: A colourful butterfly, flowers that filled their big hearts with joy, and beds of flowers so easy to bring up that it seemed the tree-women that they could spend all their days standing in a mist of delightful scents and colours without a worry and with endless days coming and going - all that had clouded their thoughts and big hearts.
The especially good tree-woman eventually rotted from the inside and she fell down for good, like any old non-living tree falling for the axe. The seemingly beautiful flowers had done their job. The green and red flowers had infested her bark and and spread it's sweet but toxic nectar into her heart and she would soon turn into nothing else but rot and decay. Even when all the other tree-women saw what had happened, they refused to accept what had happened, because even the red and green plants gave them such pleasure - and to make matters worse, no one wanted to be the first to propose a return to the lofty forests their husbands took such good care of: To admit that they were wrong or even returning to the boredom of their ancestor's forest seemed to them just plain silly.
"Do what feels good", mother Nature told them without them ever really realizing it.
They all agreed that they were all so very free and happy in their wonderful valley garden, and that the especially good tree-woman probably had fallen asleep for good and that she obviously wanted to forever be a part of the forest of flowers. They pretended not to see her rotting body amongst the greedy, colourful flowers, which by now had started to nearly outgrow the tree-women in size.
One by one the tree-women fell and rotted, killed by the strange flowers.
The tree-men had nearly stopped returning for a good hundred years due to some disturbing times in their region, and when a tree-man finally was able to travel the long distance to see his wife, she and all the other tree-women were all gone, and instead a horrible valley of tree-flowers had sprouted, with disgusting, rotting smells and fumes, and weird, huge birds (looking more like giant insects) flew around and finally attacked the tree-man forcing his escape back to his forest.
The tree-man was not sure what had happened and fell over short after he returned to the other tree-men, he fell and started to rot soon after. The rest of the bearded, old tree-men - there were nearly no saplings left - never really understood what had happened to the tree-women, and their race would slowly die off without them ever knowing where the tree-women went.
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A bit different for this blog, but the reason is stated in the last paragraph of the text below. If you read it, okay, if you did not read, that's fine.
Sorry for the barely acceptable flow in the language - I write a lot in Swedish, and the flow is different from English, in my opinion, and I do not master the English flow, to be honest. Also, there are some confusion as to where to use "was" and "were" (amongst other grammar-questions), but this story might explain a little bit what happened with the entwives and hopefully tickle my (and perhaps your) sense of curiosity: What kind of weird things live in nature's unbound valley? You see, I very much want to sculpt these things and needed something to get me started...
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