The largest dogwood tree in the country is a half hour from my house. It was a beautiful late spring day in North Carolina. The blossoms had already fallen off the dogwoods but I wanted to go back to see the special tree.
It stands a stately watch over the Matthis Family Cemetery by a church near Clinton NC. I wanted to go commune with the holiness and ancient wisdom in it, to take a twig to pray by and pay my respects to the living and the dead in the place.
I parked by the road a hundred yards from the tree. There was a single mourner, a woman preparing to leave; the church was deserted. I got out of my car and waved goodbye to her and she left. I had the place in silence to myself.
I skirted the graveyard walking in that stiff, self conscious manner I adopt in such places and arrived at the plaque in front of it, calling the tree the "largest known living dogwood in the USA" certified thus in 1995, 31 feet tall and with a 48 foot branch spread.
I stood there feeling the silent electricity of the place.
To the left of the tree there's a fine little marble bench facing the largest part of the cemetery and I went over to read the inscription on it." Perhaps they are not stars in the sky but rather openings for our loved ones to shine down upon us to let us know they are happy."
I smiled and walked around the tree touching the bark and discovered a large cavity on the opposite side of the tree from the bench. Inside the cavity I found a geocache box. It had a notebook and a dozen tokens that people enjoy leaving in such things, but I had nothing to leave there.
I closed the box and walked away back to my car to find something, took a nickel from the dash and went back to put it in the box.
I was reaching into the tree to get the box when I saw it. Ten feet away on the bench there was something I hadn't seen the first time I looked at it. I went to pick it up and found it was a metal barrette or hairclip. It was dirty and rusty and I picked it up and rubbed the sand off it.
I am pretty sure it wasn't there before when I was looking much more closely at the bench and I am completely certain there was nobody else there to leave it when my back was turned.
It pleases me to think of a ghost little girl seeing I needed a token to leave in the box and putting it there for me to find, so that's what I did with it. I signed my twitter handle in the notebook and left the nickel and the clip inside. I embraced the tree, standing there for a long time listening to it and finally left the place, trying to figure out what just happened.
I will go back to speak with the spirit and see if the barrette is still there which I believe it not be. I think she ghost will take it back to give to someone else.
