Wowowow. This newsletter marks an anniversary for me. Five years ago, I sent the first post to 20 people. The focus has changed a bit (and might again!) and the audience has grown far larger, but the structure matches my original formula: "a picture to begin and a poem to conclude."

If you ask me about my newsletter data, I'd assume you want to know how many posts I have published or how many words I have written. Our modern techno-minds equate "data" with numbers. That's not wrong. It's just myopic.

Numbers create a foundation, but data expands into stories that linger. Often, that sticky quality comes from visual translations. I have a penchant for the handwritten options, from postcards between friends to sketches of the sun. Or even cardboard boxes.**

Aside from the presentation, raw data can exist in a tangible form too.

I have worked with several collaborators on a project about DC landscapes for three years now, and I have focused on the tree in the lead picture. If we could see that sycamore's rings, we could determine its age, corroborate historical anecdotes, add to climate records, and inform several scientific calculations for urban forests.

However, capturing that data requires destruction.

So an irreplaceable opportunity arrived this month when city officials emailed me in our ongoing conversation: decay on the main trunk had spread to a hazardous extent. The city promised to update me on the schedule for cutting down the tree and offered to preserve a slice of the trunk for later study. Even just a high-res photo of the stump would provide a key to many locks.

I headed outside for a walk a few days ago, and on my return, I saw nothing but some woodchips scattered where a tree had stretched skyward. Crews had ground the stump into the dirt. Not a trace. And never a word from the city teams.

Let's recognize that a thousand tragedies more consequential than mine happened that same day, in DC and beyond. Why care about a tree in comparison? I would encourage you to ignore a zero-sum framing and flip the construction.

Many tragedies, but this one could have been averted.

Something like 130 years of data—or 100? or 160?—is now sawdust on the street corner and, I'm told, mulch soon available at local Home Depot stores.

I wish this milestone newsletter was humming to your inbox with a celebratory tone, but the gap between the simplicity of the pledge (expectations) and the irreversible failure (reality) has absolutely gutted me. "What we leave behind and what is left of us / are related questions."

**I highly recommend the book Living in Data — big fan.
 

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This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.