📿 Map The Constellations of Your Tenderness

A practice in fearlessness and remaining human

Across the road - mid October

Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

Last week the apple orchard across the road from us cut down all of its trees.

I’m so disappointed about this. Heartbroken, really. These apple trees looked healthy enough and they’ve been a fixture of our home— quiet neighbors that greet us at our door when we step outside for the day. My eyes are still adjusting to the vacancy that their downing has left on our horizon and the piles of logs that they’ve been reduced to. It makes me irrationally queasy to see them like this. They’re just trees, I know. And also, they were our neighbors. Lovely neighbors, I might add. Cheerful, quiet. And (it’s easy to forget about trees) very much alive. I apologize to their remains when I cross the road in the evenings to check the mailbox. 

As I reflect on the loss of these trees, I’ve begun to see this experience as part of a larger practice: mapping the moments that move me to care, even when it’s uncomfortable.

The other day as the chainsaws were vibrating through our house, I considered how trees communicate nearby threats to one another through their root systems. This is true for pests and fires, and I imagine true for chainsaws, too. I envisioned the alarm call that was sounding beneath the soil in the field. A series of underground sirens, urgent as an ambulance— followed by silence when the trunks hit the ground. Unlike us, they can’t uproot and flee. They stand still, knowing harm is coming. Do trees feel anticipatory fear? Do they make peace with their ending? What do they do with this knowing of emergency that’s spreading through their field? 

Standing in the same spot, two weeks later.