A few years ago, I fell into the daily habit of walking around a local forested park a few blocks from our house.
Yesterday, on the way to Palisades, I took the first picture and thought, what came first, the root or the sidewalk?
You’ll notice a fenced playground across the street. It used to be the parking lot for a funeral home that is now a Montessori School.
The genius of recycling.
When I entered the park, I was primed to discover other examples of survival. Isn’t this old timer magnificent?
And these guys don’t give up.
Five years ago, Rebecca and I built a back porch that required a new sidewalk, so we moved the birch tree you see in the middle of the photo below from its birthplace along the sidewalk path. We carefully dug under the root ball to give the tree a good chance of surviving. We needn’t have worried.
Both of us remember the first Earth Day in 1970, Joni Mitchell’s environmental anthem, “The Big Yellow Taxi,” and her admonition not to cover more of the earth with concrete.
Well, we sinned.
That’s one reason we have planted 10 trees on our property and why my daily walk through a forest is penance, pleasure, and enlightenment.
Trees can get through the most challenging environments.
That’s a lesson worth pondering for other living things.
Happy Earth Day.
