Spring, survivors

Looked out the back door this morning and saw my own trusted indicator of Spring; my fire scarred tree coming out of hibernation. I say my tree but, although that's how I think of it, it actually stands up against my back fence but on the wrong side in a little bit of left over land from when the estate was built, a severed edge of the old, vanished onion field whose ghostly onions still sprout through ornamental gravel and tended lawn. For 25 years it's been growing from a sapling to the twisted adult it has become. Some years ago we were the victims of an arson attack that reduced the fences and the two caravans at the back of our property to charred fragments and ashes. At the height of the blaze this tree was well and truly on fire. Ever since I have become increasingly attached to it. It refused to die, dropped the most damaged limbs, sealed the edges of the long, wide scar rising up its back and carried on, and each spring it reawakens.