In the heart of the forest stood the oldest tree of all — a great oak so wide that ten children holding hands could not reach all the way around her, and so tall that her highest leaves seemed to brush the clouds. She had stood there for hundreds of years, through storms and summers and silent snows, and she had watched the whole forest grow up around her, sapling by sapling.
The other trees called her Grandmother Oak, and they loved her, for she looked after them all.
Grandmother Oak gave more than anyone knew. Her wide branches sheltered the smaller trees from the harshest wind. Her deep roots held the soil together so the rains could not wash the hillside away. Birds nested in her hollows. Squirrels stored their acorns in her bark. Beetles and mosses and tiny creeping things made their homes in her shade. A hundred different lives all leaned, in one way or another, on the great old tree.
One autumn a terrible storm came roaring through the forest, the worst that anyone could remember. The wind shrieked and the rain lashed down, and the younger trees bent and trembled and feared they would be torn from the ground. But Grandmother Oak spread her great branches wide and took the brunt of the storm upon herself, breaking its fury, sheltering the little ones huddled close behind her.
All night long she stood firm, groaning and creaking but never falling, until at last the storm blew itself out.
The storm had cost Grandmother Oak dearly. She had lost some great limbs, and she knew her long life was nearing its end. But she was not sad. For all around her feet, scattered by the wind, lay hundreds of her acorns — and in each one slept a tiny tree, ready to grow. "You see?" she whispered to the forest. "I am not really leaving. I am only changing into all of you."
In the seasons that followed, the acorns took root. Little oaks pushed up all around the clearing where Grandmother Oak had stood, reaching their first small leaves toward the sky. And though the great old tree at last grew quiet and still, the forest did not lose her. It carried her on, in a hundred young trees, each one a piece of her long and generous life.
"A forest is never just one tree," Grandmother Oak used to say. "It is everyone who came before, still growing on in everyone who comes after."
And the great old oak lives there still, the old folk say — not in one tree now, but in the whole green forest, sheltering and giving, season after season, world without end.