Angel Oak

We visited some very special friends along the coast of South Carolina. We grew up together and every time we are together, I hurt myself laughing. This visit was no different. Milissa is addicted to a game called Phase 10 so we played often, with strange rules and loads of laughs. She took me and her boys to John's Island for a day on the beach. We watched a thunderstorm roll in across the sky and left at the very last moment, stopping only to visit the oldest living thing east of the Mississippi River, east of the Rockies. The Giant Angel Oak has shaded John's Island for an estimated 1400 years or more. The pamphlet I read said 400 but I looked it up online and the historical site said 1400. Either way, it is a really old tree. It is 65 feet high and provides shade for an area of 17,000 square feet. The branches are the circumference of regular oak trees and the weight of some of them has left them touching the ground. Severe damage from a hurricane named Hugo moved workers to put in cables to support some of the lower branches. I think I was the only one totally stoked about this tree but it was pretty awesome! My parents took us to see it when I was a little girl and mom's parents took her many times. It was nostalgic, historic and very beautiful! It is amazing that trees can grow and thrive for so long and yet much more intelligent creatures only survive for 100 years at the most. Something to think about huh?

Mandy
“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
Carson McCullers