The sun was bright and the sky was blue. Snow covered the entire landscape, and it felt good to be alive. My mother had stood next to me from the dawn of my existence. For a hundred years she stood tall and proud. Her branches shielding me from cold winter storms and gently parting for the summer sun, a sense of love and security filled my entire being.    
My mother whispered in the wind, "It’s that time of year again little one.  The Barbarians are coming, I see them approaching, beware.
My heart sank to my lowest branch. Once a year the barbarians would come and slaughter half the forest, no one knew why? The bodies were wrapped and dragged off, never to be seen again. I could hear their crunching footsteps as they approached.   A tall, blond, bearded barbarian with ice blue eyes stared at me. A smile formed across his face as he peeled his gloves off one finger at a time. He spat into the palms of his hands and rubbed them vigorously. Slowly he rolled up the sleeves of his dirty red flannel shirt and picked up his saw. My mother screamed in silence.
   Bewilderment was all I could feel. What was happening to me? The pain of the saw was overwhelming. I screamed, but the barbarian seemed oblivious to my agony. I fell to the ground forever severed from my life force. I was now doomed to a slow and painful death.
  Dragged by my trunk, I ended up on the back of a pickup truck along with several other friends. Soon we arrived at the death camp. The screams and groans of a hundred souls weeping in silence were deafening. A plaque was placed around my neck reading "$25.00". I wept in silence at this final indignity.
The snow began to fall, the soothing flakes landed gently on my branches. I sensed the mother weeping for all her slaughtered children. She began to speak, "Forgive them my children for they know not what they do."
 " You who inhale their foul pollution, and exhale their breath of life will be avenged."
"Your carcasses they burn, they dig up your ancestors and burn them too. All this burning, raping and pillaging will soon end."
" In their ignorance they are dismantling their ozone shield, poisoning their water supply, and causing me to increase my temperature."
"Fear not my little ones their fate is sealed, their extinction is imminent."
" Your children will once more inherit this domain."
"Patience, your deaths will not be in vain, trust me."
The snow continued to fall, and darkness soon descended. The weeping had stopped; just an occasional groan broke the silence of the night. The initial pain was gone, my branches were going numb, and a strange sense of tranquility filled my being as I pondered my fate. I could not comprehend my situation, why was I being slaughtered? I was too small to become a rocking chair or a table. Was I doomed to become a throw away pair of chop sticks at a fast food Chinese restaurant? With so little mass why slaughter me? The night passed as I pondered all the possible metamorphic ends of my body.
Dawn was not kind. The ugly barbarian shook my trunk, disrobing me of my coat of snow. Once more I stood there naked and bewildered. The sun came out and the death camp sprang to life. Barbarians arrived in their monstrous machines. They strolled through the carnage, pausing here and there trying to decide which corpse to take home. A dark skinned barbarian and his mate looked me over; their animated and noisy offspring insisted that I was the one.

  Tied to the roof rack of a Lexis SUV, my journey continued. The wind was cold, and I could see ice crystals forming on my branches as we sped along. Finally the gas-guzzling monstrosity, having consumed thirty-two dinosaurs worth of gasoline, came to a stop.

Once inside their abode the barbarians got busy a steel apparatus was attached to my base, and I was placed in the corner of the living room. The decorations were next; synthetic snowflakes from an aerosol can covered my branches. The tinsel and glass balls were next. An electric string of lights topped off by a plastic angel completed the funerary make up.

The logic of this madness eluded me. Why would any being murder a perfectly healthy life form, then decorate the corpse, and watch it decay?

Days went by. Dust settled on the plastic snow, my life force weakened even further, and my skin began to shed.

On a gray dull morning the female Barbarian disrobed me. She put away all the tinsel and balls wrapping them most meticulously. Done with the packing she dragged my naked carcass out side. She laid me on the sidewalk, along with two hefty bags containing the remains of their last supper.

I lay there looking up at the sky; my life force was dwindling rapidly. In the distance I could hear a monstrous machine approaching. The monster stopped periodically, and a rattling of cans could be heard. The monster resumed its journey. The sky was becoming dim my oblivion was approaching. With a crescendo of rattling cans the monster arrived. Two Barbarians grabbed me, from each end, and tossed me into the steel jaws of the monstrous machine. The monster closed its mouth slowly.

In the silent darkness I saw the light. At first a small beam it expanded rapidly engulfing me into a vertical tunnel of light. A subtle fragrance of daffodils filled the air. The monster had fallen silent, and gone. The Barbarians seemed irrelevant now, what happened to my remains also seemed irrelevant. The Daffodils were enticing, I turned and gazed into the light, I saw the mothers face, warm, gentle and beckoning.

"Come" she said and so I went.