quaking_aspen ovenbird My daughter called it “the waving tree” because its leaves would flicker in the wind like a greeting. When the tree waved its million hands, my daughter would wave back and laugh and this is how I know that trees are people too. On walks I would make a point of stopping to touch fingers to bark, letting heat penetrate through to the inner cambium. I liked to imagine that we could speak to each other this way: hand to heartwood. When the windstorms arrived each year the aspen would let leaves fall like gold coins and I would collect handfuls to take home, drawing them in my sketchbook, pressing them between the pages of favourite novels. On the day, a few months ago, when I found my quaking aspen flayed, I felt grief and rage rising in me. A beaver had come up from the pond in the twilight hours and chewed through to sapwood, leaving the tree standing with a wound open to the world. I know that beavers only do what they are made to do, but I felt the loss keenly. Two days later the tree was gone, deemed a hazard in its injured state, and taken down to a meager stump by city workers who surely felt no reverence in their task. At least I got to say goodbye…but there is a piece of sky that holds an absence where once there stood the aspen’s crown against the expanse of blue and my heart flickers still when I pass the place it once lived, and breathed, and called to me. 250506 ... ovenbird Today I passed the stump of the aspen and noticed there, in a crevice where death becomes soil, a sunstruck sprout, an unfurling life, insisting. 250508 what's it to you? who go blather from