Trees

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited. (31) Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

No doubt we are about to enter the time of year when we see the world through the colorful leaves of a tree. Truth be told, I have seen the world through the lives of trees throughout my life. I remember planting trees with my dad as a child, when one maple in particular was planted just for me. I also spent many days of my childhood, playing beneath the weeping branches of four large willows that thrived in the often wet, low-lying reaches of the backyard. Willows are so great for imaginative play!

I walked the lake shore path more times than I can count on my way from my dorm to classes and back again my freshman and sophomore years of college in Madison, and I awakened to love in spring beneath the large oaks that lined Bascom Hill, fed a thriving squirrel population, and towered over pairs of college students soaking in the sun's rays as winter broke and pheromones rushed anew. Once a tree toppled in a storm in St. Paul and almost crushed my sister-in-law's car.

My older daughter hugged trees repeatedly as a toddler walking around the neighborhood and parks of Boston, and both girls buried each other in fallen leaves from the numerous, mature trees on our property in State College. My younger daughter and I collected enormous acorns each day on our walk home from elementary school in Ithaca. We stuffed our pockets to overflowing, filled any number of jars and hurricanes, and strung them with beads as decoration which I still keep in the basement in a plastic bin marked Seasonal Decor.

Now, I am taking a tree class offered by the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards. I am learning how much I don't know about trees and meeting some of the dedicated people who study and care for them in my new home. The class is a place to meet new people, explore my new surroundings, and connect with nature to renew the spirit. A walk through the old growth forest of Montpelier on one of the first cool and foggy mornings of autumn will never be forgotten.

Tony Russell, Master Naturalist with the Virginia Native Plant Society, summed up trees so eloquently:

In our paved, constructed, developed culture, we sometimes need to remind ourselves that trees are our living relatives--very distant relatives, but nonetheless fellow beings with whom we share not only history but genes, DNA, and fundamental life experiences. Like us, they are born, they live, and they die. They breathe in and out, they have circulations, they suffer injuries and sicknesses, they have sex lives and offspring, they respond to light and dark and cold and heat and hunger and thirst. They are both individuals and part of communities. If we have the feeling, when we enter a woods or forest, that we are at home, it's because, in some deep and calming way, we are. We are entering our ancestral home, surrounded by distant, beneficent kin who are quietly tending and nourishing the world.

I think of this often when out in nature as climate change wrecks havoc on the delicate balance of the biodiversity of a particular ecosystem, and I know my species is to blame. I know we would all benefit from seeing the world more often from the vantage point of a tree. If you are game, you might enjoy reading Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. I just loved this memoir which juxtaposes chapters on the author's life to becoming an acclaimed, female biologist with chapters on what science now knows about trees, the awe-inspiring, puzzling, and urgent. Most importantly, th prose on trees is deeply moving and poetic.

Of course, you might like something shorter and more concise on trees. My only recommendation is to simply be with a tree, up close and personal or immersed in text written about trees. Both are revelatory. You might start with Merwin, who also echoes my sentiment as trees have many fellow admirers:

Elegy for a Walnut Tree

W.S. Merwin

Old friend now there is no one alive

who remembers when you were young

it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world