tree trunks

I was driving home today, when I saw a truck carrying tree trunks. I got sad, remembering how to tell the "age" of a tree...seeing the rings made me think of each of those rings, or years....short one for little growth, the long ones for lots of growth...like us, humans. I realized it saddens me to see a cut tree, the core of me hurts. Our years are marked the same way....these last couple years would be the longest rings on my trunk. I have grown in ways I never thought possible. These 20 trunks, how many stories can each individual tree tell, what about each ring, branch or leaf that grew on one tree...The things it saw in the last 20-50-100 years. Have you ever really looked at a leaf? I've always been fascinated with human reproduction, but what about that leaf, how many processes did it take for it to go from bud, to green leaf to red or brown once it fell off? The sun, the rain, the cold dark winters, forest fires, logging...
As a tree I'd never want to be "cut-down", I want to fall, gracefully at a meter diameter, after an ice Storm. I want to be climbed, I want birds to nest in my branches, couples to carve hearts and initials, and a tire-swing on my lower branches...once I have fallen, I hope that someone uses me to build a fire, for heat and light, we'd come full circle, together, my tree self and the one who wrote this.