the big burr oak.

Right outside of town, there's a huge oak tree that we've visited a couple of times.  And by huge, I mean huuuuge.

And by 'a couple of times,' I really only mean a couple of times.   It's a tree.  There's not exactly a ton of stuff to do there, other than ogle the tree, but it's an oddly satisfying experience, so we've gone at least once each summer that we've lived here.  The kids really love it, and would spend all day walking around the base of it, fitting themselves inside knots in the trunk, finding all kinds of little caterpillars and ants that make their homes there, and generally marveling at how big it is.

And we'd probably let them spend all day there, if the ground beneath the tree wasn't littered with millions of shards of miscreants' broken beer bottles.  I can tell the general populace shares our reverence for the life of this tree.

It's estimated to be about 350 years old.  Think about that for a hot sec.  When the War for Independence was raging on the other side of the Appalachians, this tree was already old.  If this tree could talk - well, honestly, if it could talk, it would probably say something like, "I just kind of stood around with my friends in a peaceful forest for a couple hundred years, and then there was this kind of Western expansion or something, and now I'm all by myself, and I stand three feet away from a paved road, and hooligans like to spray paint expletives all over my trunk.  The trajectory of my experience seems to be on a steady downhill."

Well.  I'm glad the tree didn't decide to just give up the ghost when that first Cretan brought that first can of Krylon along.  We're all pretty happy this fella is still here for us.