Every October I find myself paying a lot of attention to trees. Fall is my favorite season (bring on the crisp air and hot tea!), and the best part, as far as I’m concerned, is watching the leaves change: some slowly losing their green to gold or bronze, others flaming into bright orange and scarlet.
So it was with pleasure that I read Sparrow’s essay “Thoreau and Me” in our October issue, in which he describes his autumn excursions, watching the acorns fall and the foliage begin to color. With characteristic playfulness, he invents a game that involves trying to catch a leaf as it spirals from a branch. (It’s apparently harder than it sounds.) Todd Davis’s memoir “The Next Peak” takes a more poignant view of trees, as the author hikes the woods accompanied by the spirit of his departed father. In a piece that’s both erudite and touching, he recalls his dad telling him to lick the sap from a sugar maple: “My relationship with trees, and my father, was never the same.”
Below you’ll find some selections from our archive that explore the beauty, consolation, and meaning humans find in these sheltering plants. We hope you’ll enjoy spending time with trees in these pieces and out in the world this month.
Take care and read well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor
The center of this essay is the author’s luxuriant cherry tree, which she loves not just for its blooms and showers of fruit, but for making her feel less alone in the house she bought on her own. The tree’s fate twines into the story of the author’s life as a single woman, where change brings both sadness and possibility.
“I circled the firs and stroked the knees of elm and oak, / giants in conversation,” Lee Rossi writes in this poem about finding sanctuary among the trees he grew up with. It’s a beautiful, dreamlike piece that carries the reader straight into his memories of being a “restless climber.”
This short story takes place in two contrasting settings: a clear-cut area that’s being replanted by a crew of prisoners, and an old-growth grove where one of those men talks to the father he lost while incarcerated. The writing is sharp, vulnerable, and hard to forget.
When I was a kid, one tree stood out to me as the epitome of all trees—a huge sugar maple that spread its branches across our backyard and above our neighbor’s lawn. Decades later I can still envision its thick green leaves against the summer sky. Many of the contributors to our August 1991 Readers Write section wrote about their own cherished childhood trees: a gingko planted at the author’s birth, an oak sapling dug up from a vacant lot, and a mimosa that’s the site of an above-the-ground version of tag.
Dustin Beall Smith’s essay opens with the removal of acres of trees from the Gettysburg National Military Park, a decimation (in the author’s opinion) meant to restore the battlefield’s appearance as it was in 1863. From there this far-reaching piece branches into passages about Thomas Merton, Robert F. Kennedy, teaching, and climate change.
This is the kind of poem I love: a short and deceptively simple piece that will linger in my mind for days. The language is alive, the metaphor just right, and the ending a balm.
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