I’ve always loved trees.  When I was a kid, I climbed them.  I sat on fallen logs, read in their shade, had picnics in the woods, ate their fruit. As an adult I let them grow in my back yard and only cut them down when their dead limbs fell indiscriminately on anyone walking out the back door.

I am in awe at their versatility.  They lift vast volumes of water, several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day, from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere.  They manufacture lignin and cellulose; regulate the storage and production of tannin, sap, gum oils and resins; dole out minerals and nutrients; convert starches into sugars. They provide nesting places for owls. They even communicate with each other.

So right now my back yard, which is the size of a large kitchen, displays a myriad of black branches, twigs, stems and limbs through which I can watch the bright blue sky, the crow family swooping around the roofs, the squirrels cavorting on the branches, the birds doing their things. And  I look to the coming of spring, when all those limbs will bud, fill out with leaves and leave me with nothing to see but a canopy of green above and on the ground.  My trees will grow, maybe some new ones will appear in what has been called “Harwood’s One Hundredth of an Acre Wood.” Maple, ash, hackberry, oak, hemlock.  Welcome.