I have not always loved trees. I was not the child who read books in the shade of limbs extended like arms and I certainly did not climb trees – my mother’s fearfulness made that particular childhood pleasure unavailable to us.  

I have not always loved trees and that is probably why my fascination with and adoration of them is so deep now. It is as though I need to make it up to them, live out an apology for my prior ignorance and indifference.

My affection for trees in winter is not insubstantial. Their shameless undressing and deliberate nakedness arouses in me an admiration that never wanes. It is their nature to reveal, in the hardest, darkest moments, exactly who they are – knotty trunks and crooked branches, imperfect and scarred. They leave me envious of their honesty.

I cannot, though, deny an infatuation with trees in summer.  Fully dressed, they entice the breeze and pretend it is their own song. Even as their limbs waltz and foxtrot and cha-cha, the dancing shade offers respite from the sun and the scent that must be chlorophyll perfumes the air as though spritzed through a giant atomizer. Behold a tree in summer and be alive.

This summer, in particular, the trees around Sandhill, buffeted regularly by afternoon and evening thunderstorms, have demanded my attention. Rarely has there been a morning when the backyard was not littered with arboreal detritus. Limbs as big around as my wrist, branches the diameter of a broom handle, twigs long and skinny like spaghetti noodles. Most I have been able to gather in my arms like an over-sized bouquet; some have had to be dragged. All of them have been deposited at the edge of the pond where they will eventually turn themselves into soil.

On Sunday morning I walked out to my car to go to church to discover that a large sycamore limb, one whose leaves were brown, evidence that it had been barely hanging on to the trunk that was its lifeline, had been wrenched off and thrown under the carport into the driver’s side door of the car.  The physical damage, only three tiny scratches, was significantly less than my amazement that no glass had been broken, no metal dented.

I pulled the limb far enough away that I had clear entrance to the car, mentally adding yard work to the afternoon to-do list in my head. Thoughts of the limb – what it must have sounded like, looked like as it was sent flying through the air – accompanied me all the way into town to my pew in the back of the church, where the sermon (coincidentally? serendipitously? providentially?) was about Zaccheus, the wee little man who, in an effort to get a better look at Jesus, climbed a sycamore tree.  

I congratulated myself for not laughing out loud. And, then, I considered whether the universe or the tree or God might be trying to tell me something. 

It was hot when I got home, changed clothes, and went outside to pull the big limb into the branch, into the growing heap of tree parts. Heading back to the cool inside, I stopped under the tree from which the latest addition had been amputated, looking as far as I could into the canopy. I wanted to know from where it had fallen, but all I saw was palm-sized leaves, fluttering in filtered light, a broad swath of green shimmering like summer sunshine on the surface of water.

It was as though the tree had developed regenerative powers like hydra or starfish, filling in the gap left by what was taken away, healing the wounds that damaged but did not destroy.  

I love trees. I love everything about them. Mostly, though, I love their audacity – persisting in purpose, insisting on getting on with living in spite of loss, and determined to teach me things I should already know.