Friday, February 4, 2011

A better pine design for paradise.

The pine trees I see in Sardinia are different. Very different from the pine trees I see in Minnesota. The Sardinian pines look like giant umbrellas. They bulge out at the top. A little like a mushroom cloud. And the trunks could pass for oak or elm or ash trees. Bare-barked. But the evergreen needles are similar to those found on Norway and Austrian and white pines. I'm impressed. Today I'm observing the pine trees in a small city park just off of Piazza Roma in Carbonia. The pines tower over palm trees. And over a memorial for the 12,000 coal miners that helped found Carbonia in the late 1930s. Under the Mussolini government. I'm supposing these pines were planted then. That makes them about 70 years old. Similar young pines, now only 10 or 15 feet tall, line many of the roadways in Carbonia. Some day, they'll form giant canopies over the roads. As they already do over some of the downtown's side streets. I never imagined the pine trees that I'm seeing here. They're stately. Magnificent. They put the pine trees in Minnesota to shame. My guess is that god designed the Sardinian pines as an afterthought. After musing over the inferior pines he created earlier in places such as Minnesota. God learned from his mistakes and came up with a far better design. For the pines in paradise. Yes, in Sardinia. --Jim Broede

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