My toddler son and I spoke about the trees as people — and indeed, for the first month of quarantine, they were the only people besides us he got to see up close.
This spring, as the world fell apart faster than we’d expected, I fell in love with trees. Not the crush of my girlhood when I admired them and fancied myself the child at the end of Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax.” In love like I dreamed about them. I saw their bodies when I closed my eyes. Branches and trunks of different species traced my insides — the arch of the redbud’s trunk in joy and pleasure; the tight winter huddle of the spruce in fear.
Until last May, two slender, sickly Eastern hemlocks grew in a corner of our backyard garden, dying as the invasive woolly adelgid sucked their sap, just as the insect is killing the great hemlock forests of the Appalachians. I took my 2-year-old son, Abraham, out under the trees with me one afternoon and showed him the fuzzy white eggs on the undersides of the needles. I explained the trees were sick.
“He wan’ his Mama,” Abraham said, reaching for the branch closest to his chubby hand. “Mama, I wanna hold his hand.” Clasping the twig, he looked up into the tree. “Hemlock tree, you feel better?” I could scarcely breathe, startled by the sudden clarity that I am teaching my child to love a dying and transforming world, that he will learn to love and lose in the same breath, and that I will learn along with him.
“Yes, the tree wants his Mama,” I managed to say. “He wants to go back to Mama Earth. Honey, our hemlock trees are dying. We will have to cut them down soon, and let them become soil.”
As a rabbi and climate activist, I’d already been grieving a long time. For our trees, for the great Appalachian hemlock forests, as well as for the burning Amazon, the oceans choked in plastic, the hungry people. For the whole beautiful and complex system of life, brought to its knees by a species rich in intelligence and poor in wisdom, the most dangerous apex predator ever to walk the Earth.
Abraham sat under the hemlocks on soil packed hard by his play. Last fall he named this spot Frog and Toad’s corner, and he likes to go on toddler “trips” there before triumphantly rushing back into my arms when he “comes home” to the patio. His little body rocked back and forth quietly. I resisted the urge to distract him, or myself, from our own versions of the same giant and holy grief.
Like so many, my husband and I were working from home and without child care this spring and summer. Caring for Abraham every day and sneaking in work emails where I could, I found myself more consistently outdoors in spring than I had been since my own childhood. Every day, Abraham and I walked the few short blocks from our Boston home to the back of Peters Hill in the Arnold Arboretum, a 281-acre collection of plants from around the world, owned by Harvard University and designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.
Every day we saw, smelled and felt the changes in the trees. The collection nearest our house features the Rosacea family, and we spent hours underneath the flowering crab apples and hawthorns, marking the days by who was in bloom, whose petals had begun to drop, who had started to put out leaves, or fruit. Inspired by the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, I began a practice of using personal pronouns when referring to all plants and animals, teaching us both a new grammar that I hoped would be Abraham’s native tongue.
As we walked, Abraham and I spoke about the trees as people — and indeed, for the first month of quarantine, they were the only people besides us he got to see up close. In the absence of human friends, greeting the trees with a reverent shake of a lower branch became an obvious choice. “Hi, European larch tree,” Abraham would say in his toddler dialect, grabbing the feathery needles of the drooping branches.
Since every tree in the Arnold Arboretum has a metal name card, fastened with a screw and a bit of wire somewhere on the base of the trunk, it was an excellent place for me to check my work as I learned to identify tree families and genera. Abraham too began to search for the name card, crouching down to “read” it, his little REI sun hat making him look exactly the part of a miniature naturalist. We developed special relationships with a few trees, like the “White Lying Down Tree,” Abraham’s name for a wild crab apple from Japan with white blossoms and a trunk that grows improbably in four directions parallel to the ground, creating an irresistible little fort.
In the evenings, when I could spare the time from work, I pored over guidebooks and Donald Culross Peattie’s “A Natural History of North American Trees,” better acquainting myself with the trees we had met that day. Do you have alternate or opposite leaves? Smooth or toothed margins? Is your bark deeply furrowed or smooth? What shape do your branches take? Your seeds? Your flowers? What story do you tell about the land? What geologic changes have you already survived? What is our history together? What are you saying?
I wanted to be able to read the trees, to listen to them, to feel the kind of breathy intimacy with them that I had with my grandmother as she lay dying peacefully over the course of a week in my parents’ sunlit house years ago. Crawling next to her in the hospice bed, I would hold her smooth and papery hand, kiss her cheeks, and receive each word she managed to speak as I might a rare heirloom seed placed in my palm.
In our own backyard, Abraham and I greeted our closest tree-neighbors by name over and over, and I felt a great loneliness lift. Rare butternut hybrid. American elm. Norway maple. Arborvitae. Gray birch. Eastern redbud. Arrowwood viburnum. Let me learn your names, your habits, your wisdom — before you die, before I die. My newest friends and most ancient teachers, watch over my son, child of a dying and transforming world — but a world yet alive with belonging and beauty.
Shoshana Meira Friedman is a rabbi, writer, mother and climate activist in Boston.
"Love" - Google News
January 01, 2021 at 05:00PM
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Teaching My Child to Love a Dying World - The New York Times
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