Shelter- A Love letters to trees by Ada Limon

The Valley Oak. The first tree, of course, was not the first tree, but the one I remember most, a California valley oak with a black tire swing hanging from it. An actual tire that filled with rain and worms in the spring. It looked like one of the ugliest of humanity's inventions hung on one of nature's most beautiful.

But once emptied, I could balance myself on that ugly tire, and watch everything spin, the world of leaves above me, each branch leading to some new ecosystem. That tree. The way I could bend my body backward. The way I could watch how itself swayed even as I spun in circles. I loved it. My brother would spin me until I was almost sick. How funny to think of getting sick on trees. I would steady myself by staring at the trunk. I could see this dry-hated bark come into focus. Could feel my legs find their roots again. And come to standing. When I had flying dreams, I often flew over that California valley oak. I liked flying dreams best, not just because I was flying, but because I could see the trees more clearly.

Hug a tree. When I was only 5 years old, a program called Hug a Tree was established. As I remember it now, we were supposed to hug trees to feel better. I remember doing this on some nature excursion, really hugging a tree as hard as I could and then suddenly being worried that I would break into tears. The tree was so sturdy and warm. I loved that tree so much it hurt. But like most things I remember, I have remembered it incorrectly. The Hugatree program was established to find lost children in the wilderness. In 1981, a 9-year-old boy named Jimmy Beverage was lost on Palomar Mountain, 60 mi east of San Diego. He was on a Saturday hike with his two brothers when he was lost and 400 searchers, including 200 Marines, combed every inch of the area before his curled up body was finally found 4 days later. He had died of hypothermia. The full name of the program was and is hug a tree and survive. A child was supposed to find a tree and stay there. The idea being to stay put, to not wander farther off into the woods. The program was established in Jimmy Beverages honor by a man who was on the search team and who was a border patrol agent for three decades. He chased down immigrants trying to cross the border. He could spot a bent twig, a rock out of place, and know how to track someone. He was a human tracker used to getting his man. He couldn't find Jimmy, though. I don't know why. I don't remember the survive part of the program, nor the story of the lost boy. I just remember that if something was wrong, a tree was supposed to fix it.

The yellow plum. The Mirabel plum tree was my first lesson in the problems of abundance. A tree from Lraine, France. It produces a sweet yellow stone fruit. And in a good year, it felt like we had thousands of them. So sugarfilled in the summer heat, it was like tree candy. I fed them to our dog, Dusty, a yellow lab the same color as the golden plums themselves until we both got sick. When the tree was heavy with them, it made me nervous. We'd never be able to eat them all. I felt ashamed to pass by it and not take one, a tree like that, offering everything of itself. One of the first times I was left alone in the kitchen to bake something after my parents' divorce, I made what I called plum balls from my own recipe. My father was so surprised I'd left the pit inside. But I loved that inside the yellow plum was a potential for another whole tree full of plums.

Little trees. My older brother has planted trees now in many places. A curly willow in the front yard of where my mother was once the caretaker, a 40 acre horse ranch that took in retired police horses from San Francisco. I was amazed at how fast it grew. He has always, in my mind, been a caretaker of trees, except for once. When he was a young teenager, right after the divorce and before the new marriages, we were walking down a street in Santa Rosa and there was a row of young trees that had just been planted. He said about ripping off the new limbs as he ran down the street. I don't even remember what it was that had made him mad, just that he was mad. Mad enough to rip off the young limbs of a tree and whip those limbs against the trunks. I remember thinking they were being whipped by their own parts and how somehow that must mean something to be hurt by yourself. I remember too my soontobe stepmother's face, now seemingly unfathomably young, at just 26 or so. We couldn't get him to stop until he just finally ran out of steam. He wanted to hurt something. And in this case, that something happened to be trees. I think of my brother now planting so carefully, so kind with animals, making sure everything in the garden flourishes. He'd never think of doing something like that, never harm a thing, let alone a tree. I wonder now about the karmic implications of youth. How once we ran down the treelined path we called the alley, though we had never even seen a real alley, and pick long acacia blooms, and whip them back and forth against each other, pollen forever in our hair. When he was in grade school, he got his leg stuck in a valley oak for a long time, maybe hours. I wasn't home. No one was home allowed as we were then to let ourselves in after school. Allowed as we were then to climb trees alone. He shouted and shouted and cried until finally the neighbor overheard him and came to get him out of the tree. I wondered for a long time if he held something against trees after that. Still, he plants them now. Red Bud in the front yard of his house in San Mo, Katalpa in the backyard.

There is still a legacy of trees, the black oak. In elementary school, at the end of the soccer field, there was a field of oaks. And once my best friend and I rode our bikes two miles there in the summer to carve our initials into one of those enormous oaks. Our initials followed by BFF, best friends forever. We had matching blue bikes, matching short haircuts, and had just turned 11. She was the person who could sit in silence for a long time with me. She was also the person who wouldn't stop talking with me if what we needed was to talk. We sat under the shade of the trees where we'd often eat lunch with our friends. Sometimes on hot California days when it was too hot to be inside, we'd have class in the shade under the trees, enough shade for everyone. Once I spotted a tufted tit mouse and said it was a tit mouse, and then the boys wouldn't stop teasing me for days because I had said the word tit. But they weren't cruel. Not yet. At night, I would worry about whether or not we had harmed the tree by carving in its skin. I still wonder if it's there. Our selfish scarring, our flag planted in the side of a tree, a vow of foreverness between two small girls who knew the names of birds and were teased for it. Or maybe it's a vow between the two of us and the tree itself. Now I am writing to that tree a letter to all trees.

The trees of Highway 12. I don't remember much about what happened between my parents before they separated except attention, the silence between my mother and my father, hands no longer touching. What I remember most is what we did after the divorce. Drive. Always my head leaned against the passenger side window in the back seat. Everything passing in a blur. Every Sunday we'd drive from our house, my father's house in Glenn Allen down Highway 12 to my mother's apartment in downtown Sonoma. The drive was 7 and 12 miles and took about 16 minutes, but in between there were trees. We'd pass the wild oaks and blooming acacia and stately olive trees that lined the fancy vineyard estates. And then we'd go to the downtown where everything was purposefully planted in the plaza. The Canary Island palm tree in the center of the plaza stood out like a flag of some new country. After nearly a decade of growing up in rural Glenn Ellen, downtown Sonoma felt like a proper metropolis with its movie theater, ice cream shop, and bars. My stepfather, who was not my stepfather yet, moved in with us in the apartment on East Napa Street. We knew him as a friend of my mother's. They'd waited tables together at a popular restaurant called Marion, where my mom had to wear black high heels and a short black skirt and red lipstick as part of the uniform for waitresses there. Brady had to wear a black vest and a white shirt. When Brady moved in, he had his own room at the front of the apartment. Brady's room with his spare decor and large black trunk at the foot of his bed that seemed to hold everything he owned. We liked him immediately. He was kind, and my mom seemed to laugh a lot when he was around. On summer nights, the apartment would get so hot we'd complain of not having a backyard or air conditioning or somewhere to cool off in the shade. And Brady and mom would pack up our dinner in a picnic basket along with his black and white paisley blanket and head to the plaza. We'd sit under the ginko or the western kulpa and cool off enough to eat. He'd say that having a public park was just as nice as having a backyard. We'd lean back and look at the leaves of the trees and he'd point out their different shapes and we'd agree with him. The park was just as nice as a backyard.

At my father's house, the house we'd lived in for most of our lives, Cynthia moved in with a fish tank full of neon Tetris and gourami and a grumpy gray cat with a flat face named Dina. Cynthia was 26 and wore khaki shorts and smoked. She was harder for us to love at first. She had strict rules and wanted things to be clean and organized. We had chores and learned to cook for ourselves, weed the garden, and vacuum over the same spot eight times, so you knew it would clean. But she'd laugh, too, and make many layered and elaborate cakes with homemade candied hazelnuts. Her cakes took the whole day. Once the neighbor's horse got out and Cynthia ran in her night gown and calmly and firmly grabbed the horse and settled it down and guided it right back into the stall like it was nothing. And during the earthquake of 1989 when the whole house shook, when the whole valley shook, she came and got me from where I was downstairs and we went outside to the driveway. She pointed to the horizon and excitedly showed me how the ground was moving. She said, "You could ride an earthquake. Just move along with it." She was intelligent, curious. I was so scared. She was never scared, and I loved that. On the drive back and forth every Sunday from one new family to the next, we'd pass this one oak tree that had fallen over during a storm. Instead of trying to move it or cut it up, the owners had simply carved a bench into it. That was my favorite part of the drive, passing the fallen over tree that now looked not like an accident or something broken, but like a safe place in between places.

The Bural in the Roman poet Avid's telling of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, the young woman is turned into a tree by her river godfather. I never liked that version of the myth. First of all, those myths were always about rape. Daphne running to keep from being raped until as she pleads, she is turned into a tree. The part that bothered me the most was because she is a tree, she cannot run. He can still press himself against her bark. It makes me dislike of it. I like the version where her mother Gaia protects her by secreting her off to some other island and Gaia consoles Apollo with a laurel tree in her place where I grew up in a place that is literally called the valley of the moon. The hillsides are full of bural. It is one of my favorite smells, brisk and divine, the smell of spring. I would like to imagine the tree as a protection not as a trap. The bural is dishious which means it contains male and female flowers on separate plants. It too is sexed and sensual. When I moved back to the valley of the moon for a few months, all I could smell was the bay laurel and it moved me to tears. I had lived in New York for 10 years and Cynthia had died and I had quit my job and fallen in love and I drove my handme-down car up the hillside to where I would live and the smell almost knocked me over. This was not of it at all. This was Gaia.

There is a Zen monk named Hmonsum who has said that when you are appreciating things you are not thinking. So if you are staring at a tree and really begin to appreciate it, acknowledge its bark, its system of leaves and branches, its scent, you can quiet your own being. When I am most in need of silence, I seek out trees. Sunnum calls it being aware of the thing that knows. The thing that knows, I suppose, is the part of you aware of your own mind. But I also like to think of the tree as being the thing that knows the manzanita. The bark of a manzanita tree feels like skin, smooth and dark. And in the early spring, full of white flowers. The one in the backyard in Glenn Ellen, across from Calabasas Creek, was so soft to the touch it gave you shivers, like touching someone else in a way that was too intimate. It was strong, too. You could hang on it, and it wasn't too high, so you could fall from it, too. I was always falling from that tree. Someone else's skin has always been so hard to hold on to. When I think of that tree, I cannot help but think of the word sensual. It was the first thing that felt that way to me. So, I climbed it and fell and climbed it and fell and never learned a thing. The year I turned 41, I had a dream that I had sex with a mansanita tree. I still remember it vividly. I still was living in New York City for the semester while teaching and I was so ill with vestibular nuritis that I found it hard to move. And so instead, my dream life flourished. One morning, I woke up almost embarrassed. I've never told anyone this. It's not something you can explain.

The tree farm. When my stepmother Cynthia was dying, I stayed in the house she shared with my father and my young brother. I was helping with the home death as much as anyone helps with death. Really, you just try to make dinner and cry in the bathroom. The hospice nurse came in and gave us a few tips for making her more comfortable. But mainly it was the act of witnessing, of waiting, of watching someone I love begin to disappear. Near their house in Stanwood, Washington, there was an area of woods, the Pillchuk tree farm, which is a span of wilderness full of western himmlocks and Douglas fur and sitka spruce. I'd walk alone there when someone else was with Cynthia and get lost under that 230 ft high canopy. Once following those trails, I wore some earrings she had given me and managed to lose one. I took the other one off before I got home so she wouldn't know I'd lost its mate. When she died later that week, I cried so hard trying to look for it in the woods. I never found it. When you write about the same death over and over again, people will start to resent you. You must tell them you are writing about trees.

The stand. I like the ways trees keep things secret. Underneath them is a whole universe and in between them it's all things that live in the shadows. The house in Stanwood, where my stepmother died, had a close stand of trees, not the tree farm up on the hillside, but just a stand of trees at the end of the road. Inside of those woods was an old broken down ford from the 1940s, riddled with bullet holes. It had been there for ages. My father, my brothers, and I liked to speculate that it was a getaway car dragged into a stand of trees so the gangsters could escape. That was back when people said gangster and mobster and maul and gams. On every visit, we'd walk to see that car, and each year I was impressed by the decay. Can you say you were impressed by decay? Nearly 20 years after we first found it, we took my young nephew. Cynthia had been dead two weeks, and my nephew, only two then, said, "That car is sad." And between Cynthia's dying and the car dissolving slowly into the humus between the trees, none of us said a word. Maybe the car was sad. Or maybe it was so happy to be finally dissolved right there at the base of trees to go from hardness to softness and disappear. It didn't seem like such a bad thing.

The Cyprus. Outside the Veterans Hospital in San Francisco, I sat for a long time waiting for Brady. Hours went by and then maybe the whole day. The wind off the bayside was hard and intense. You could see the deep blue water of South Bay, the seal rocks, the froth of white capped waves driven by the ocean wind. Breathtaking. The VA hospital is situated on what must be the most gorgeous strip of coastline near Land's End. Once in the 1770s, a semaphore signal location for incoming ships, and then a port of defense in the 1800s. This land feels too desirable for something as sensible as a hospital. I stared at the water for a long time that day as I waited. But what eventually drew me inland were the Mterrey Cypress trees and how they looked almost prehistoric. The wind having honed them into strange and other worldly shapes. The cypress can grow up to 133 ft and some legends have suggested they may live to 1,000 even 2,000 years old. But apparently just under 300 years is the definitive record. I will give the Latin name here. Hespero cyperis macro karpa. This is to honor Brady, my stepfather, who always knows the names of trees in Latin. After the war, he studied botany at Santa Rosa Junior College. He wanted to spend time with trees. I like the notion of Cypress living 1,00 to 2,000 years. I want everything to live that long. When I look up the cypress trees of San Francisco on the internet, I find pictures on a woman's blog. The pictures are beautiful. There are tunnels of trees you can walk through. But what delights me most is in the comments section, someone has written, "If you like a cypress tree, you'll really love a Douglas fur."

Benefits of trees. I read in a 2012 article in Scientific American called How Hospital Gardens Help Patients Heal. Just 3 to 5 minutes spent looking at views dominated by trees, flowers, or water can begin to reduce anger, anxiety, and pain and to induce relaxation. According to various studies of healthy people that measured physiological changes in blood pressure, muscle tension or heart and brain electrical activity. I started meditating in 2007 just after I was rushed to the urgent care with stroke level blood pressure after a routine visit to the gynecologist. It turns out I have something called labile hypertension, which means my blood pressure is highly reactive. After significant tests, the doctors determined that in my case, it's most likely genetic. However, meditation does help. Among the many fascinating things I've discovered while meditating over the past 14 years is that if I meditate outside near trees, when I open my eyes after a session, the trees all seem to have moved closer. Before I knew about any type of meditation, Brady told me you can meditate by looking at trees. I'm sure he didn't say that the meditation was simply called looking at trees, but that's what I call it in my mind. I was learning to meditate, but if I ever struggled with any formal practice, I tried my best to look at trees. I'd imagine my blood pressure lowering, my heart rate studying, and I'd say in my head to my stepdad, "Look, I'm looking at trees."

Cherry trees. For a brief moment, as a freshman at the University of Washington in Seattle, I thought I wanted to major in forestry. I thought forestry was the study of trees. After one beginning level class, however, I learned that it was all about forest management, which at least then had more to do with sustainable logging than what I wanted to do, which was to look at trees, to learn about trees. I didn't know then that what I really wanted to be was an arborist. In the middle of the university's liberal arts squad, there are around 30 Yoshino cherry trees planted. A pioneer species, they do not live long. These specimens were planted in 1939 in the arboritum and then moved in 1962. When they are all blooming at once, it feels otherworldly, as if the whole planet has been taken over by blossoms. When I was in my junior or senior year there, I'd get stoned and go sit under the cherry trees. And if I really focused, it felt as if the petals, when they dropped, were deliberately dropped on me. They'd float down, and it felt like generosity, something so tender it could hardly be deserved. Now one by one they are dying. It is of our nature to die even trees.

Fruit trees. My father in his retirement has become an organic apple and pear farmer. This sounds like the beginning of a Hallmark film. And we've made that joke before together. How he and his beautiful third wife, Linda, live in the hills of San Diego County, in a small town known for, in all seriousness, their apple pies. On their property, they have 130 trees, many of which had gone dormant before they coaxed them back to health. Now, it's a small organic pear and apple orchard. When I visit, the first thing we do is take a tour of the apple and pear trees. My father puts his hand on the trunk or the branch of a tree and begins by saying, "Now this old girl here," and so forth. I love the way he has decided to love these trees to encourage them to blossom and fruit again. In his third marriage, he builds something with his wife that is centered on the caretaking of trees. In the spring, when the apples, pears, and lilacs are all blooming, the bees sound loud as cicas, everything is alive. I told him once that part of his legacy will be trees, to which he nodded. He's planted so many trees in his life. Before Cynthia died, he planted trees all along their acreage in Stanwood, and we tour those trees, too. These were among the few times we'd get alone to talk about how he was doing. Not about her illness or anything else, but just how he was. Touring the trees, we called it. There was a big leaf maple on their old property that shed leaves as big as my head. The year Cynthia died, I put a leaf over my whole head and took a photo. It looked the way I felt, like my head had become a leaf, so that what was left of me would be blown away. Now he has an orchard in the exact opposite weather of the Northwest. He and his big-hearted love harvest and sell the fruit for ciders and small grocery stores. When my father's father first crossed the border from Mexico, they smudged oranges and he lived in a chicken coupe. Now my father has 130 trees of his own. Even if it isn't our own legacy, there is a legacy. A legacy of trees. My mother's mother packed peaches as a job through high school just north and inland of where my father lives now. It was a valley of fruit trees and everyone worked in orchards and farms. She can still tell you the number of peaches which correlates to what size the peach is and therefore what box it should be packed in. Everyone in my bloodline has picked fruit. There is a reason I think now that they were so proud of their own little fruit trees in their yard. A lemon, an orange tree. To own your own tree, to own the fruit you pick is a big thing. My stepfather Brady, raised in the projects of Providence, Rhode Island, never thought he'd own a house. He bought his first house with my mother in 2016, the same year my husband and I bought our first house. The house has an orange tree out front, and it is his pride and joy. Brady has it rigged with bungee cords so when the branches get too heavy with fruit they won't break. Just recently I was sitting on their porch and an orange fell onto the patio stones. That's how you know it's ready. Brady said and we all laughed. But we ate it too. When my friend Julie met my maternal grandparents Jack and Alame in the early 2000s they took her on a tour of the trees. It was a small backyard. Still, it flourished with all the good things that grow in Southern California. My grandfather picked Julie a fig. She had never had a fig before. My grandfather picked three from a high branch. He was tall and gave us each one, keeping one for himself. He taught her how to eat it, how to watch for bees, how you could eat the skin. He was in his 80s and she was in her 20s. But later that night, she said that was the most sensual thing. And while it made me embarrassed, I knew what she meant. The giving of fruit, the picking of it, the sharing it. It seems absurd that something so simple could give so much pleasure feels so intimate. And yet it does.

The number of trees. Before I moved away from Brooklyn for good, I had my friend over for drinks around my small green kitchen table. The very table that serves as my desk in my office in Kentucky. I was trying to explain to her how I was feeling. The man I had been in a relationship with for over a year had left me right after my 30th birthday. And even though we weren't right for each other, I was struggling to recover from that loss. The impact of it, all those future plans smashed on the sidewalk like a beer bottle thrown out of a car window. Before he left me, the man was helping to fasten my favorite necklace around my neck. My hair piled up, my soft parts exposed. It was spring and the windows were open to the car horns of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The necklace had an A on it, presumably for Ada. As he fastened it, he called me April. He had a friend named April, a thin blonde who liked baseball. And while I knew it was a sign of something, I ignored it. It was always so much easier to ignore things then. Later, a few months after he left me, I saw him holding hands with April at an outdoor concert by the East River. Signs are always signs. Turns out A stood for [ __ ]. I just wanted to walk away from things. I was trying to explain to my friend, taking nothing. No stuff, no packing up of boxes or bits of writing, no sorting through the piles of clothes that accumulated in my ever shrinking closet. I just wanted to walk away and leave. She stared at me and said very flatly, "That is what people who want to commit suicide say." Suicide had nothing to do with it. I just wanted to walk away from New York. I needed less buildings, more trees. To this day, I am fascinated by people who have simply walked away from their lives. Those stories of seemingly normal people who left everything and move to the woods. People like Marilyn Jine, who left her family's 9-bedroom in the Midwest to live in a small house with no running water in northern Alaska. A 1995 article in the Los Angeles Times reads, "Jasmine, who is in her 60s, says she realized late in life that she is a lesbian and that that would have caused her expulsion from the society she left behind. So, she moved to Alaska and went back to college, earning a master's degree." The article continues, "With no financial security, she has had to learn to do everything for herself, including fixing her car when it breaks down. I feel like I'm at the beginning." She says, "My whole life is ahead of me." I wanted my whole life ahead of me. And perhaps I also wanted some parts of my life behind me. I had put so much faith in people in the wrong people. Around this time, NPR ran a story about how satellite images had shown that there were roughly 400 billion trees on the planet, or 61 trees per person. Everyone seemed elated at this new NASA supplied knowledge. But to me, that seemed like not nearly enough. I remember thinking how urgently I needed to spend time with trees, especially if I only had 61 of them. This year, a new study was conducted called Mapping Tree Density at a global scale and published in Nature. The new study claims the original estimate was wrong. Globally, there are an estimated 3.04 04 trillion trees, which is about 422 trees per person, which seems to me much more comforting. I'd rather trees outnumber people on a level of extreme abundance. Less comforting is that before humans they think there would have been roughly 6 trees and we lose about 10 billion trees a year to deforestation, agriculture, development and infrastructure. This seems to be a good reason to plant more trees. It also seems like a good reason to notice them, to recognize them like the people in our lives.

The culter pine. I began to identify trees in earnest around the same time I became obsessed with the idea of memory. What it was to hold something in your head for as long as possible until it felt almost permanent. This was in winter when it is hardest to discern one tree from another. The smooth and rough bark left stark naked by the elements without so much as a leaf bud or a seed pod to point you in the right direction. My friend gave me a small book that was called Identifying Trees in the Winter. It proved useful, if also frustrating. The trees I have the hardest time identifying are conifers, the ones with needles and cones. I group them all together and call them conifers or evergreens. Conifers for their cones and evergreens for the evergreenness of their needles. But much as I love them, it's hard for me to tell them apart. It's a new project of mine to get better at distinguishing them. The ones I know the best because I find them almost frightening, almost overwhelming in their strangeness and heft are the culter pines. The culter pines have the largest pine cones of any conifer. My father and Linda have them in and around their property in San Diego County near Lake Kuyamaka. And the first time I saw one of the pine cones on the road, I actually gasped. They are native to both Baja California and Mexico and the dry rocky mountains of Southern California. Basically, they are native to what was Mexico and what is Mexico. Their pine cones are often over a foot long and can weigh as much as 11 pounds. According to the California Native Plant Society, locals call them widow makers. And I can imagine they do some serious damage if dropped from some height. Like stones and shells from the sea or from riverbeds, pine cones are also something I am known to collect. I've yet to bring a culter pine cone home to Kentucky, though, in part because I'm not sure how to fit it into my luggage. A brief search on the internet sends me to a website that offers the seven best pine cones. Somehow the culter pine cone is listed as number seven, which makes me distrust the internet all over again. Facts about pine cones, however, does not disappoint. Pine cones shrink and become tighter during the cold weather to protect their seeds, and they spread out and grow during warm weather. I am much the same way, expanding and contracting, holding close to everything I own inside of me. A pine cone can take 10 years to fall off of a tree, which also suits me. I take a long time to let things go. Just recently, I sat on my father's deck overlooking the Kuyamaaka Mountains during an unseasonable heatwave. The Culter Pines, he says, are growing so fast he can hardly believe it. It was the first time I had seen him in 18 months because of the pandemic, and we both felt older. Still, he pointed to his trees and talked about saving them from the beetle, which is short for various varieties of bark beetles that are destroying trees all over the area, from oaks to conifers. The beetle bores into the treere's trunks and kills the tree from the inside out. When trees are weakened by drought or in competition for water, the outlook only gets bleaker. The golden spotted oak bore has apparently been responsible for the death of 100,000 oak trees in the area where my father lives. To talk about trees then, especially in that area, is to talk about tree death. There are experts that come out and check your trees, the D-shaped holes that mean the beetles have taken hold. And if they have taken hold, the tree comes down. There's no saving it. The culter pine can grow 24 to 36 in a year to a height just over 80 ft. They live for around 100 years if nothing manages to take them down. No fire, no beetle, no cutting, just 100 years. It seems like they should live longer. So to talk about trees is to talk about our attachment to them. Our longing for them to be okay. To talk about trees then is also to talk about each other. The ways we are attached to what is living and how much we want it to go on doing just that for as long as possible. It is never only trees but what binds us together. The trees, the roots, the eternal part of us that is both the seed and the tree.

Fear of trees. When I was 25, I moved to Provincetown, Cape Cod on a writer's fellowship. The towers had come down in New York City, which had been my home for two years. And two weeks later, my best friend Trish drove me in a car we rented with another friend's credit card. Neither of us having a credit card we were allowed to use at that point. All 6 hours to Provincetown. It felt good to get out of the city, but also wrong. The wrong time to leave, the wrong time to be away from the ones you loved. Still, Trish dropped me off at my small apartment in a two-story house at the Fine Arts Work Center where I was supposed to live and write for 7 months. What I did mainly was walk. I walked because I was having panic attacks that were almost debilitating. I couldn't stop thinking of New York, the towers, the planes, the people, the walk around zero, the smell, the dust. And so I'd put my shoes on and walk. Most days I'd walk 10 miles before lunchtime. I'd walk from 24 Pearl Street down Commercial across the Breakwater all the way to Longpoint Lighthouse where sometimes I'd be exhausted enough to sit down and start to write or cry or both. Despite my anxiety, I was never scared of being out there alone. I passed some people here and there and sometimes see folks on boats going by to look at the lighthouse. Mostly I'd watch plvers and sandpipers and corrants and iders and tried to remain very quiet. If I tried to explain my panic attacks to anyone, I could easily bring one on. If I mentioned how scared I was or how my body itself was scared, I'd start to feel my throat getting obstructed, closing. Like most coping mechanisms, booze helped, only to make it worse in what became a cycle of drinking too much for the anxiety and then waking up with twice the anxiety and a royal hangover for good measure. Needless to say, it wasn't the right time to be away from New York. But it wasn't the right time to be anywhere really. I tried to pay attention to trees around me. The pitch pines, the birch, the beach trees in their close stands that felt like an army steadily advancing. On a good day, the army would feel like it was protecting you. On a bad day, like it was coming in for the kill. On one particularly bad day, I got lost in the beach woods just in from the dunes. Having somehow gotten off the paved path to Race Point, I couldn't find my way out. It was a bright November day, and I remember sitting and just sobbing. Every direction looked exactly the same. Sand and trees. Sand and trees. Finally, I took some deep breaths and listened for the road. I heard the faint sound of traffic now, and though it was hard to discern from the sound of the ocean, which was also on all sides, once I could home in on it, I managed to walk to the road and made it the next three miles home. It wasn't until years later that Brady told me he had a friend who had been killed in the woods of Cape Cod in 1969. A young woman with her friend who thought they were off for an adventure, a date with two men that took them to Truro. The details are horrific and I won't put them here. All in all, the man they encountered murdered eight women. Cut their hearts out. I know true crime is all the rage, but I don't believe in glorifying heinous crimes or criminals. I write it down only now because it makes me think of my sweet stepfather who knew I'd go out there and walk alone for many miles, who knew about my panic attacks and not telling me about his friend. A woman he'd even dated briefly. A woman he'd been worried about as he'd been right to. He didn't tell me because he didn't want to make my panic attacks worse. Be safe, he'd say. Be careful and be safe. Now, I don't know if I was careful or safe. Maybe I was just lucky. I don't like to talk about the bad things that happen in trees. It feels as if doing so puts that pain on the trees, and they do not deserve it. I want the beach trees to be innocent. I want them to go on growing and not notice everything that has happened at their roots. There are hanging trees throughout this country. But it's not the fault of the trees, though I do wonder and sometimes worry what they may remember. In the poem by Mahmud Darwish, the cypress broke. The last few lines are a girl said, "The sky today is incomplete because the cypress broke." And a young man said, "But the sky today is complete because the cypress broke." And I said to myself, "Neither mystery nor clarity." The cypress broke and that is all there is to it. The cypress broke and perhaps that is the gift of trees. Neither mystery nor clarity and that is all there is to it. The cyprress broke. I love the clear fact of trees. The stories of trees are all our own. But the tree has one we cannot know. In this trees are the opposite of humans. Perhaps this is why we are drawn to them.

The sugar maple. I once had to move because of a tree. When we first moved to Kentucky, we lived in an old tobacco way station. The place was strange with a bedroom that was an old brick safe, including an enormous metal safe door that terrified me if it was closed entirely. Imagine being locked in a safe. But the house on a whole was nice with hardwood floors and old but mostly working appliances. The biggest draw to the place was the beauty around it. While it was on a fairly fast and dangerous corner of Todd's Road on the outskirts of Lexington, the property, for the most part, was peaceful. The front lawn, which was mostly ours, though neighbors would join us for a fire pit conversation or bourbon, had the most beautiful sugar maple I had ever seen. In one book of my poems, I probably have three, maybe more, poems about that tree. In the spring and summer, it was green and heavy with samuras. And in the fall, it turned so red and orange and yellow that I was known to take pictures of it multiple times during the same day. The light always doing something unique to the color that drenched the leaves. We bought a picnic table and set it under the tree. I sanded it and stained it one late summer day, and all fall we sat under that tree. The owners of the property had warned me that the tree was failing. It had been struck by lightning and was dying. And the local guy who owned a tree farm up the street said it would likely come down in a bad storm. It would either fall on the house or in the street, and either would be dangerous. Whichever way the tree falls, is that a saying? Still, I'd hoped it would last for the years we were there. We were there five. And during our fourth year, we came home from a trip to California, and the tree was gone. Just a stump, something worse than the giving tree, just a wide scar of sadness emerging from dry grass. In its place, they planted another little tree. All of this was responsible, smart, well advised. Still, it didn't feel right. The whole house seemed to change. My office was too bright to work in. The bathroom window felt exposed. And worst of all, I didn't want to sit outside on my picnic table. Didn't want to write while looking upon that stump. It felt like a violence. The tree just gone all of the sudden. I tried to ease my own pain a bit by watering the new little tree and imagining what it would become eventually. But I missed my tree, my original tree, its shade, the wildly variated color of its leaves, its, for lack of a better word, personality. I wandered into my husband's office and told him we needed to move. The tree was gone. The house was gone. That's how it felt. How attached we are to trees. The way they give us a landscape. How they are the landscape. The house we bought, the first house we've ever owned, has an enormous silver maple in the front lawn. My office looks out on it now. There's a squirrel's nest. And in the wind, the tree doesn't look so much like it's dancing as that it is a host to 1,000 little movements all taking place. It is all energy and life. And in those moments, I worry about how much I love that tree. I am always worried about how much I love eucalyptus grove.

The boy I loved from 15 to 21 and I used to sit under trees. In one scene from that long drama of our teenage love, I remember his having a particularly hard time. We stopped by the Broadway market for candy bars and sodas and things we thought would make us feel better. Sweetness in a world we were slowly realizing was bitter and cruel. We drove to a grove of eucalyptus trees out on 8th Street at the edge of town. It was a hot California day nearly the end of a school year a few months before his family would move him to Germany on account of his father's service in the Air Force. Everything was dry and brittle and hurt all over. It was a heat that aged you. Skin drying on the bone like laundry left too long on the line. But in the middle of those tall trees, the shade calming us, we could breathe again. We crawled on top of the 1973 Ford LTD he'd bought from the retired school district superintendent for $700 and unwrapped our little sticks of sweet goodness and stared at the tops of the eucalyptus trees. We watched them go back and forth, their white bark as clean as possibility as the wind shook their medicinal leaves around us. And it felt like that medicine. I was 15 and I already knew that's what it was. Back then, we were rarely silent. Mania and chaos and heightened sexuality swirling around us for 6 years before we'd ultimately break up a few months prior to my 21st birthday. But that day, we were quiet. I don't know how long it lasted. Maybe only a few minutes before one of us began talking or singing or flinging ourselves about in the unfairness of the stifling heat, but it felt like it was a long time. In my mind, it was the longest and fullest silence of our lives. The trees were holding us, and we were swaying back and forth, and for a moment, we were going to be okay. Soon after he'd move to Vick's house in Germany. Then I'd follow. Then I'd come home alone. Then we'd go to separate colleges 5 hours away from each other and somehow still try to remain together, driving our beat up cars down the I5.

In the rain, opening electronic mail accounts with the university computers in the library, the letters, the phone calls, all those ways we try to reach one another finally failed us. Or youth did. Or maybe youth released us.

The eucalyptus tree was introduced to the state of California in the 1850s from Australia. Thought to be good for lumber, quick to grow, and quick to harvest, the trees were planted throughout the state. But the wood proved too hard and twisted when it dried. The leaves were known to cure colds, to ease pain. But the tree had another attribute, one that made it a danger in California's dry and every year drier climate. When a eucalyptus catches fire, it doesn't just burn, it explodes. And so now the trees are coming down. Chances are the next time I make it home, the trees will be gone.

He's married now. That verse love with a family living in Canada where I'm sure they have so many good trees. Still, I hope he crawls out on the top of his car sometimes to get closer to the trees. I hope he thinks those eucalyptus are still standing.

The hackberry. I'm always working toward identifying the new landscape as if naming it will make me feel safe. In the backyard of our house in Kentucky now, we have mulberries, hackberries, silver maples, mimosas, crab apples, and a plum so loaded with purple plums it feels goddy obscene. Too much of a good thing surely when so many people are suffering.

Not everyone is interested in naming trees. I have a dear friend who can remember everything when it comes to poetry and our travels together. Names of people we met while on our tours. Books we read together late at night after readings. The names of bars and restaurants. What I ordered, where we slept, the clever thing our friend Adam said. But he can't remember how to tell a birch tree from a beach.

Two days ago, he came to visit with his two kids. He's been a widowerower for exactly one year. We sat on a large screened in porch and talked for hours while his kid played in the blowup pool and the birds fed at the feeder ecstatically, maniacally. What we kept returning to was how absurd it was that we kept being alive while his wife was not. One day we must have talked for 12 hours straight. My husband played tag and raced with the kids on the lawn and I made ropa vieja and drank large glasses of tart Spanish red wine with my friend. He used to never drink wine. He was remembering so much and now and then would cry. It was his wife's birthday. We had chocolate cake and ice cream. His kids, six and nine, ate it with gusto, but we did not sing. We couldn't sing. Soon they were heading to the place on the beach where they last saw her alive.

In one pause in the conversation, he said, "What is the name of that tree again? The tree you always tell me about?" I knew what he meant. It was the name of the tree that had a good sound. He's a poet. He likes the way things sound. Hackberry, I said. And he nodded and said, "Hackberry. See, I can never remember that. The brain can't hold everything. Our brains are so tired."

Later, he sent me a picture of the beach where he sat the day he found out she had died. The moon, he said, was in the exact same location as that day he got the phone call. We remember what we need to remember. Hackberry. Hackberry. We like the sounds of the tree name because it sounds like something being torn in half and yet growing just the same. Hackberry. I will remember it for him.

Cottonwoods. A long time ago, I moved to New Mexico during the late summer, early fall, really, to be with a writer much older than me. We'd met at a poetry reading in my hometown. He immediately invited me to be on the radio with him. Then he invited me to live with him. This is for the most part how poets work. I was 25 and he was 49. He had a nondescript townhouse in Albuquerque that was within walking distance of the Rio Grand. I'd walk by the river almost every day for hours, sometimes trying to figure out what my life would be like. A river seems to help those sorts of conundrums. Ask a river whatever you want. It gives you a marsh. It gives you a road runner.

In the boke, I'd passed the biggest, most gorgeous trees. Later, I found out they were cottonwoods, dishes, with female trees and male trees. I myself felt like a female tree living with a very male tree, a two male tree. This man had spent many years in prison, and there was an undercurrent of violence to him. Though to be very clear, he was never violent to me. Violence had been done to him, and he had done violence. But that was a cold, clear river under him now. What he was now was serious. Every day in his office, off the small kitchen, he wrote feverishly. He took his land seriously. His morning drum circle with other native men was serious and private. He took his runs seriously. I liked that seriousness. It felt like a dedication that I needed. I wanted to be serious, wanted to speak spells to my ancestors, to kneel in the earth and feel like I belonged to it. I loved how he made me feel browner than I was. All my white edges tanned on those riverw walks and everything smelled like roasted green chilies. You could order a green chili cheeseburger at almost every local burger joint and I tried them all. Everyone around us was brown and spoke Spanish or native language. And though I was not from there, I felt like I belonged. We were all from there because we were from Alan, the mythical and not so mythical homeland of the Aztecs or other native peoples of Mexico like my grandfather's tribe, the Puripeta.

One thinks of New Mexico as red dirt and tumble weeds, Georgia O'Keeffe's muscular white skulls painted against red hills and a haunting gray desert sky. But the boss is green, lush with sage, shaded, and runs the borders of the river like an exhale. Cottonwoods are largest here in the Boske, though they are becoming older and aren't being replenished. Cottonwood seedlings and saplings need flood waters to take roots. The river doesn't flood anymore, not since human interference. Even then, nearly 20 years ago, walking in the boke under the cottonwoods felt like visiting the elders. According to the Apache tribe, the tribe this man belonged to, the cottonwood was a symbol of the sun. And in some northern Mexico tribes, it was a symbol of the afterlife. In one rapole myth, a little girl climbs a cottonwood into the sky itself. Everything felt sacred in Islam.

Once at a crowded house party after the burning of Zora in Santa Fe, I realized I wanted to leave the man I was with. So Zorobra, the 50-ft tall effigy, was burning in the distance. Everyone at the party was watching from the viewing spot. You were supposed to burn up all your gloom. But somehow I was still gloomy. In the house where women had cooked pole verde and pole roa in giant pots all day, I sat on a small white kitchen bench and ate bowl after bowl of p so I needed to consume and consume. I looked out the window at the cottonwoods and pinons at the burning effigy. I loved New Mexico, my hlan, but I didn't want to be with this man. I wanted to be with the women safe with the steamy smell of hommin stewed pork and chiles. A smell so thick you could eat the air. I did not want to go out to where the men were watching things burn. I wanted to stay here with the women and the view of the trees in the dark. In the end, the goodness of the river and those towering cottonwoods were all that man and I could agree upon. We were two trees remaining very separate. We could even agree that a girl could climb a tree right into the sky. But that was all.

"I wish people were old trees," O'Keefe once said. "I think I could enjoy them then."

Moon trees. Some trees have already been to the moon and back. Can you imagine? One of humanity's wildest inventions and one of nature's most precious inventions collided to send trees to the moon. Over 2,000 seeds were carried in a small canister inside a canvas pouch by astronaut Stuart Rousa in Apollo 14 on January 31st, 1971. part of a joint project between NASA and the United States Forest Service to record the effects of prolonged weightlessness on seed germination and seedling growth. Five different types of tree seeds went to the moon. While Shepherd and Mitchell walked on the surface of the moon, Rousa, a former smoke jumper for the Forest Service, orbited with the seeds in the command module. When the shuttle arrived back home, the seeds were distributed to facilities to aid their germination and survival. The sweet gum, lob ly pine, and sycamore were sent to the forest service in Gulfport, Mississippi, and the redwood and douglas fur were sent to the forest service in Placerville, California. Many of them were planted next to the control seeds that had stayed on Earth, now reunited in the dirt. Apparently, there is no distinguishing between the tree that went to the moon and the tree that remained earthbound. They are called moon trees.

I have never seen one in real life, but apparently they are planted all around the country, all over the world in fact, from Brazil and Switzerland to Japan. I want so much to see a moon tree, but another part of me is so thrilled they survived and that they look just like regular trees. Does a placard on a tree make it different than another tree? What is the significance of naming? It seems it is also important to sometimes stand in the middle of a forest and not know the name of the ecosystem around you. to not work at picking out each plant and animal and record it in your mind or your journal, but just to experience it without categorization. To feel it, to feel that it is a living thing and you are a living thing. Whose name are you giving the tree anyway? the English name, the Spanish, both colonizers, the Latin name, the native name in the language of that area's original tribe. What does the tree want to be called? We think of naming as essential to how we connect with things. But sometimes we connect beyond language, beyond the name and its scientific history, its uses. What about pleasure? Dear trees of the world, let us be in pleasure together.

In a beg Good Tanya song I used to listen to over and over when I lived in Brooklyn, the lyrics said, "You got roots that cannot be torn from under. Won't you shake it like you've never done before?" And that is what I want. to shake it, to tremble in tandem with trees, not to own them or pin a ribbon to them or a placard. I don't care if this tree I'm looking at right now went to the moon. Is pleasure part of thinking or is pleasure part of not thinking? What part of us enjoys settles in when the thinking stops? Is it the moment the tree is moving and you are moving and it seems like there is a clarity in that, a softening, a closing between you and the world. I had a friend from Uruguay who always called getting stoned smoking trees. He always wanted to smoke trees. And we'd go sit on the back patio of an outdoor bar shaded by bamboo and smoked trees and look at the sky beyond the building. Maybe instead of naming trees, we should smoke them. Or whatever the metaphor of that is, inhale them. Let ourselves be changed and altered by them.

The Woods. I've written three fulllength failed novels. The first one is called People from Here, and it mainly has to do with a woman who has messed up her life and then gets healed by going home and looking at trees. She spends a lot of time in the landscape of her home valley. I described it once to a friend as the ultimate poet's clunky first novel. A woman standing in a field thinking of all the other times she stood in a field. In this novel, there are both redwoods and manzanas and all the trees of my youth. Unfortunately, the trees are the best part.

The second novel is called The Woods. It sounds like I'm making things up now, but it's true. This is a young adult novel that centers on a young woman whose mother has died of cancer. And on the eve of her mother's funeral, she discovers that the woods behind her house are haunted. Or rather, they're alive. Alive in a way that is more human than tree. My favorite part of this whole novel is the discovery of a treehouse in the tops of the redwoods as large as a high school auditorium. The trees can carry you from one place to another. You can travel by tree. I remember distinctly wanting that to be real, to be carried from one branch to another. The soft breath of trees around you. the cold, clean, oxygenated air of trees.

The last novel is called Drama Drama Drama, though it doesn't have much drama at all and could instead be called Trees, Trees, Trees. The novel is about a woman who goes back to her alma mater to teach drama. She is a small dog. She walks around Seattle's Green Lake a lot and looks at trees thinking about how her life might go next. The last image of the novel is the main character staring at the lake and noticing how it is both troubled and untroubled by leaves. I'm glad I wrote those books. And in some senses, they weren't failures at all, but just more time dedicated to looking at the world in a weird way. I'm also glad those books were never published. I enjoyed making them and staring out the window while writing. But did you know that to make 62 books, you need one whole tree? With an average of two million books published each year in the United States, that takes about 32 million trees. How strange to write about trees and then cut them down to share what you've written. Everything once again is connected by trees.

I say at the end of almost every story, "I like the part about the trees." Just recently I was in Tivoli, Italy and while touring Hadrien's villa, the 200 acre villa of the Roman Emperor from 120 AD, I couldn't stop staring at the olive trees. One olive tree was estimated to be 700 to 800 years old. The oldest olive tree is said to be about 1,500 years old. The temple ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and I couldn't stop wondering about the trees, their history. At the Vatican Museum in Rome, my favorite part was the Fontana de la, an enormous first century AD bronze statue of a pine cone, more than twice my size. That's what we love about trees. How they minimize us, desenter us, knock us off our silly pedestal of human superiority. Trees loom over us.

"I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees," said Henry David Thorough. But the best thing about that quote is that he did not he did not come out taller than the trees. Perhaps what he meant to say was, "I took a walk in the woods and came out smaller than myself."

In the 1980s, the term shinyoku or forest bathing emerged from Japan, but the act itself was hardly new. Forest bathing just means we should walk into the woods to be healed. And we should, as long as there are woods left, we should walk into them. To practice forest bathing, you must walk into a place where there are trees and let all your senses be activated. That's it. That is all that is required. You will breathe in the phytonides, which is a word that means exterminated by the plant. It is an antimicrobial organic compound given off by plants. But I like the phrase exterminated by the plant. I would like to walk into the woods and let my human self become exterminated by the plant. I want only to wonder about the wonder of trees. to put down the technological device I am tied to and walk into the woods and be made small again. Be in awe like the pine cone at the base of the trunk to stare up at the branches like I did in the tire swing and let myself get dizzy on trees. Perhaps I cannot remember everything. Perhaps I cannot save everything. But I can write a letter to trees and four trees I can praise the trees branch by branch.

About the author, Adah Lean is the author of six books of poetry including the carrying which won the national book critic circle award for poetry. Her book, Bright Dead Things, was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tus Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Leone is also the host of the critically acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poems, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions.

about script. Script Originals is a program featuring ambitious original fiction and non-fiction. These vivid, compelling stories, which can usually be read in just a few hours, span a range of genres: narrative journalism, literary fiction, memoir, thrillers, mysteries, true crime, sci-fi, and narrative history. Script is the reading subscription service that's changing the way the world reads. Script offers access to the best ebooks, audio books, magazine articles, and more. Script works directly with publishers to constantly add new content to the platform and provide its subscribers with highquality and personalized reading recommendations. Scrib's goal is to inspire curiosity and learning through its diverse range of content that amplifies important topics and under represented authors. The app is available on iOS and Android devices as well as web browsers and on Apple Watch. Follow at script on Twitter and Instagram to learn more.

This is Ada Leon. I hope you have enjoyed shelter, a love letter to trees. Text copyright 2022 by Ada Leon. The cypress broke from the butterflies burden. Copyright 2007 by Mahmood Darwish. Translation copyright 2007 by Fati Judah. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. www.coppercananypress.org. Production copyright 2022 by Script Originals. All rights reserved.