Scout on a Person's Values- When a girl's parents die and leave her a seed, she lives always ready for death but never anticipating what will happen to the plant she raises all her life.

 The sound of chainsaws cradled me to sleep. I had never heard it before, but I knew it would be useful when the seed I planted grew into itself. My acquaintances didn’t see the purpose of comfort beyond their sight, leaving the world vulnerable to the snakes and parasites of the ground. Their sight didn’t extend past the feeble grasses and sickly animals they raised. So many creatures they would watch die, but never did they fear their fate under our feet. I had watched my mother and father give life to the land I shared with the ghosts of our town and how it shriveled and whispered a curse when they died. That wooden home they left me in protected me from the delusion of the permanency of each breath I took, and their last gift injected purpose into my future.

The seed.

Not any seed; a seed that would grow into a graceful and strong maple tree. As they were wrapped with their unforgiving sheets, ripping away their last layer of living skin, the last gust of lively wind shot the seed into the air. As it spun in circles down to me their eyes closed and the luscious emerald fields and fulfilled souls fell down the six feet of their grave, landing on my outreached hand. But no length would reach the realm they had entered, and I was alone with the only burst of life left in our radius. I planted it over them, hoping that its roots would light their grave and connect their souls. The clouds grumbled and yelled at the grief of their death but withheld their tears, handing me the reins on showering life into my seed. I wept over the lump of dirt that sprouted into a bright young seedling, reflecting the only vibrancy of a town wrought dry. I lay with it through the dry mornings and cold nights, giving my soul as a replacement for the sun. And when the rain returned and the bright star strangled the clouds from its view, I read to the leaves that hung in the crisp air.

            I lived with-or more truthfully, for- the seedling that became a young plant. When its leaves fell and withered, my bark-colored hair would fall in chunks. Its branches would shake in the wind and my arms would go limp as they did in a drought. I heard the brushing of others as they watched me care for it. They only saw someone wishing to die, but their perspective was flawed by the illusion of living. But we live to die, and our bones will forever be under the ground while we live for a few decades. The few that may be prepared for death aren’t anticipating its sudden uprooting of everything they lived for. I live for something that will come with me, and isn’t that nobler than spending each day working for objects that will look down on me when I pass?

             The years passed and I traveled from crouching on my knees watering the sprout, to sitting on a chair watching the seedling, to laying behind cloudy windows praying for the health of the grand maple tree. It seems that the farther you are from something, the faster it grows. When I knew my breaths were reaching their limit, I called upon someone for the first time. The carpenter was to cut down my life’s ambition to house me. Only when the last living leaf twirled off the wide branches did my heart stop and my brain freeze. I felt them lay me on the smooth grain of the plant I had raised, the color of its bark that I had preserved for so long sanded off, did I regret my choice? Why must a being die because another did? But my dry lips and heavy legs couldn’t fix the problem that I had died for, and the only one I tried to live for.