Grief and Gratitude

For a time when I was a little girl a man called Gez filled the hole my father left. My mother’s love. A carpenter, with thick, brown hair that fuzzed around a balding crown, he wore a moustache and a chequered shirt and lived in a green bus at the edge of a field beside the woods. Gez taught me about trees. I must have been six years old, I think, when Gez taught me that trees are alive, sentient, that they listen and feel. We could climb them, but we must ask their permission first, be respectful, and give thanks when we were done. A wise and gentle man who embodied the patient steadfastness of an oak, Gez instilled in my young heart a deep respect, a reverence, for all living things.

I think of Gez often. I think of him as I plant oak and alder saplings into the black soil that sticks under my nails and squishes, cool and soft between my bare toes on the land I have come to love and live on, hundreds of miles and a lifetime away from the field by the woods where a little girl with a…