Green

If ever there has been a word more confused than me, I should be happy to make his acquaintance.

I hear many voices speak of the green movement. This is strange to me. I am not going anywhere. I saw a lady with a black grocery bag the other day. On its side was written “I am a green bag.”

‘Are you?’ I thought. ‘My dear compatriot, I think you’re confused. Have you become so passive as to let these big folk call you something you are not? Perhaps you were once green, and then fell into a puddle of oil, and that is why you are now black. Or perhaps the same thing is happening to “green” as happened to “oil”. The purses of the big folk changed the course of what we once were.

There was a time when I was the flowing field, bending in the wind. Evergreen, I was the pine, the only memory of summer amid the winter snows. As the seasons changed, still you saw me. As the rolling ages passed I stood, a bastion of life.

Yesterday I realized that someone had changed my meaning for me. I don’t know who I am exactly, but I know that I’m not me.