What the Trees Know That We’ve Forgotten

And why it matters for writers

When I buried my placenta after Billie’s birth 29 years ago (well, actually, the placenta was in the freezer for a few years before I buried it, but that’s another story), I planted a swamp white oak along with it. I held hands with the kids and their dad and we sang a little song as we tossed dirt back into the hole we’d all dug together. It was like a blessing and a letting go, all at the same time. The letting go was deeper than I knew then, because, less than a year later, we sold that house and moved.

I never got to see that swamp white oak grow.

Seven years ago, not long after we had moved into our current house, I planted another swamp white oak, to remember the first one. Back then, the oak was just a little stick of a thing, a real Charlie Brown Christmas tree of oak trees. It looked like a trunk with some leaves glued on. My husband and I would sometimes laugh about it, our scraggly little oak, just doing its best to stand up straight.