Raised by Trees

Before my salad days, I was sour as cabbage. I grieved as publicly as a mower for its meadow, cried on every occasion—a virtuoso of tears. Except, my mother noted, when she took me to the woods: as the sky filled with leaves, my last tearful gasp for breath drew in the leaf-mould and the silence and I would fall still. Grief may have been my natural habitat, but the forest soon became my strengthening medicine. Before I even learned to talk, I knew that long sighs could mean happiness among the pines, and that time passes differently in a sunlit glade. And long after I grew out of my bluest period, the forest continued to be a refuge from my own self-centeredness, a place where I could practice being human.

leaping rock to rock the children I never had