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The next time you visit DC, I'll take you to see a tree I planted. I visited it myself two weeks ago, and the 10-foot dawn redwood appears healthy, a bow-rake's length away from the sidewalk on a college campus. A white pine is the only other tree I can remember planting in my life. That twig had about three branches and 17 needles when the grade-school version of me slipped it into the ground on my grandparents' land. No scooping required, just the shallow gash of a rounded shovel.

Trees have occupied an increased portion of my brain-space lately, and books about them fill my reading list for 2020, including nonfiction about a 110-year-old red oak and fiction that features trees in “an ingeniously structured narrative.” 

We have trees in America that started as moon seeds and trees across the world that have other superpowers, like creating their own rain. 

A survey of nearly 50,000 Australians found correlations between human health and these ringed wonders. Yet our displays of appreciation range from timber poaching in the western U.S. to reverent agrostructures created to protect single citrus trees on an Italian island. 

Sure, these examples are notable, but trees should resonate for another reason. They mimic us, from complex social interactions to salmon dinners! 

But the most compelling point of communion lies in their connection to deep time.

Trees are, in many ways, divine. Like parents, they pre-date us. Like friends, they grow with us. Like everlasting tokens, they record our history while also existing apart and beyond it. 

"I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down."