People who stay in one place long enough can appreciate the changes that time produces.

For those who move every few years, a tree is a tree is a tree. For Max and Sandy Cozine, the unusual tree in their front yard is linked to four decades of memories, and that makes it special.

When the Cozines built their own house on their property on Green Road, off Silver Lake Road, in 1960, they did a lot of land clearing. But they left a tall old stump from which a small evergreen was growing.

“It was only 18-inches high when we noticed it,” Max Cozine recalled last week. Today it’s a full-branched hemlock that’s probably 100-feet high. Its pleasing shape suggests it would be a good candidate for the national Christmas tree.

But that’s not what makes it unusual. The unusual part of the tree is at the base where the trunk is broken into three main branches, spaced apart by two tunnels: one triangle shaped and the other semi-oval. If you look closely, there are actually five separate legs of the trunk and a third, much smaller opening.

“It was sitting on top and grew over the top of the stump,” Cozine said, explaining the tree’s tunnels. A child could crawl through the triangle, and Cozine himself can crawl through the oval even though he’s in his mid ‘80s.

Through the years the old stump has rotted away, except for its base which can still be seen. But from it grew that determined hemlock, which would stop at nothing to get its roots firmly in the ground. A neighbor told Cozine that the stump was from a tree that had been cut 125 years ago.

The Cozines built their house after Max retired from the Navy. He went on to be junior partner in Haddon’s Furniture in Oak Harbor for 20 years, then he started his own roofing business. Through all those years, the little hemlock kept growing.

Had the Cozines removed that stump in 1960, their grandchildren wouldn’t have the tunnel tree to play around and there would be just grass where the towering hemlock now stands.

It takes time to appreciate something like that.