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The Tree That Didn't Want to Lose Its Leaves by Brian Brock     When Fall came, all the leaves on all the trees started to turn yellow. All the other trees turned to each other and sighed, smiled, and talked about how beautiful it was last year, to watch the leaves fall.     "Fall! Leaves fall!? What?" said one stubborn young tree. "But, I don't want to lose my leaves. I like my leaves."     "Oh, nonsense," said the other, older trees. "This is the Great Change, the forever change. Every year, we drop yellow leaves on the ground. They rot and turn to dirt and help us grow, and - "     "But I like my leaves! And I won't drop them!" said the obstinate tree.     And as the months passed, while all the other trees' leaves fluttered down, and the trees sang and worshipped and waved their bare branches in the whistling wind, one tree, this very stubborn tree, held on tight as its leaves turned yellow, then brown, and then grey.     He said, "hoho! Look at me! I still have leaves!" and the other trees just sighed and smiled.     When it snowed, the stubborn tree was weighed down, because all those leaves collected a great amount of snow, which it had to hold up with its branches. But it held on tight.     When Spring came it looked around at all the other trees and scoffed, thinking they would surely be sad at having no leaves now that the sun bore down on their bare branches. But surprisingly, they still just sighed and smiled, and the stubborn tree began to wonder, "just what is going on here?"     Then, in the shining sun of one March morning, the tree blinked its eyes open and was astonished to see thousands of points of green light covering the forest. There were ten or twenty little green buds on each branch of every tree. Every tree? The stubborn tree then looked at its own branches, covered with dead, crackly, ugly old leaves from last year, and it finally understood the Great Change.     "I hate these old leaves!" it said, and then shook from root to trunk, from trunk to limb, to branch, right out to the ghostly grey bits of the past at the end of its twigs. It shook and shook and shooook, and all the trees watched as leaves fell in Spring for the very first time.     Sure enough, the next morning, the tree had little green points of light all over its branches, and sighed and smiled and looked forward to the next year, and the next, and the next. The End