Teaching My Child to Love a Dying World
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.
Credit...Lucy Jones
Published Jan. 1, 2021Updated Jan. 4, 2021
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.