It’s Earth Day and I am thinking about trees. One of my first childhood friends was a giant sugar maple from which hung my rope swing with its blue wooden seat. I did not name the tree–it needed no name. It was always there. It did not scold when I nicked the bark with the swing seat. It seemed not to mind the bare spot in the grass over its roots where I pumped my feet to fly up toward its branches. I saw that tree a few years ago—it was a tall broken stump full of ticks, and I felt that I had lost a family member. In truth, I had. In the largest sense, we are family, humans and trees. Then there was the wind-fallen oak behind the house where we lived when I was in high school. That long, horizontal trunk was what in a more adventuresome girl would have been a balance beam, but the idea of gymnastics was unknown to me. I knew how to walk that tree.

Having grown up mostly in Maine, “The Pine Tree State,” trees still feel like a necessity and I welcome the thick greenery of the place on my annual visits back. I go in high summer when the foliage is almost ominous in its thickness. Let the “leaf peeping” tourists admire the flaming fall colors. I’m content to bask in the deep shade of hardwoods and mixed evergreens.

As I write I’m wearing my tree of life earrings, Yggdrasil, a mythic green ash done in silver. The branches and the roots, both visible in the jewelry, remind me that trees feed the imagination. Words are the fruit of the forest, which is our library. On my current reading list are The Tree by John Fowles and three others recommended by a favorite librarian: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Uprooted by Naomi Novik, and The Song of Trees by David George Haskell.

Here then is my modest Earth Day celebration of the tree:

WHERE AM I GOING?

     I’m going off to find

            a tree I can lean on,

                        watch the grass grow.

In another life

             I might be a tree

                                   oak or maple, pine or ash.

           Ah, sapling, I will be

                           your shade and your soil

                   until you are tall

                    and well rooted.