A Treasury of Trees

 "You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes..." - Richard Powers, The Overstory

I first learned of Richard Powers and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Overstory, while listening to Ezra Klein's podcast. When Klein interviewed Powers, I listened while dropping campaign lit for schoolboard candidates. I was fascinated by the optimism Powers projected and the connection he felt with trees. My mind promptly dropped the ball when I jumped back in my car to check off twenty more tasks, but when two of Aden's good friends recommended the book to her, I had to buy it. 

Powers' own website describes his 2019 book in this way: "There is a world alongside ours - vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe."

Unfolding catastrophe aside, the book so far has pulled me into each story, in awe at the connection between people and trees. It forces me to reflect on the relationship I've had with trees, and I've been fortunate to have a few tight-knit bonds with my leafy brethren. My longest-lasting and closest bond was with a willow tree in our backyard where I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I spent long hours setting up model horses in its sprawling surface roots, playing with my herd and occasionally with the (inferior) models that my friends brought over.

I spent even longer hours reading in the branches, high above the pandemonium wrought by my four younger siblings. My next-door neighbor and sixth-grade crush  exchanged notes with me in a secret mail-basket that we could raise or lower with a rope, and I often followed the exciting discovery of one such note with a rapturous escape to the treetop to ride the flexible limbs back and forth in the wind.

All three willows on our property were climbing trees for the youngsters in our neighborhood. My tree, directly behind the house, was my favorite because its lowest branches were a jump for me and too high for my siblings and most of the neighbors to reach. I loved all the trees, though, and still hold the traumatic memory of my dad and the other residents of Carl Court chopping down the willow in the front yard and removing it when it was diseased.

We had a beautiful twenty-year-old cottonwood tree in the backyard of this house when we moved in, and its shade and solidity were beneficial for all of us - until it, too got sick and the danger of large limbs falling on the roof or on the children required us to cut it down. When the kind tree removal folks came with saws and ropes I cried, and the foreman, Griff, patted me awkwardly on the arm. "Lots of people get emotional when they lose a tree," he said, "and I totally understand why."

Of course I recommend Powers' book, but I wrote this post in memory of my beloved trees. Trees are the reason I chose our current neighborhood - our current house - and trees are a requirement for our retirement home. I wonder what stories my readers have of trees in their past, and what worlds you, too, have shared with our soft- or hardwood relations.