Weathered.

There’s the trunk of an old tree a few hundred meters from MB’s mom’s house in south-west Ireland. It looks very much the worst-for-wear, weathered to a bare totem pole-like stick figure on the edge of the grassy field. Even most of the bark is now stripped bare. Where once upon a time birds might have nested or sung from the denseness of its branches and leaves, that possibility is now no more unless mother nature performs one of her regrowth miracles.  But no sign of that yet. The tree itself, or ninety percent of it at least, succumbed to a storm some years back leaving only the forlorn and desolate looking trunk as a memory of greater and greener days.