The Presence of Trees

I found an article the other day about a situation in Melbourne last year on how the city had identified all trees with a different number and email address, so that citizens could send emails to city officials about complaints, a way to improve the city life. It turned into people of the city sending love letters to their favorite trees:
To: Golden Elm, Tree ID 1037148
21 May 2015
I’m so sorry you’re going to die soon. It makes me sad when trucks damage your low hanging branches. Are you as tired of all this construction work as we are?
To: Green Leaf Elm, Tree ID 1022165 
29 May 2015
Dear Green Leaf Elm,
I hope you like living at St. Mary’s. Most of the time I like it too. I have exams coming up and I should be busy studying. You do not have exams because you are a tree. I don’t think that there is much more to talk about as we don’t have a lot in common, you being a tree and such. But I’m glad we’re in this together.
“The email interactions reveal the love Melburnians have for our trees,” the article said. Why then, did the article make me want to cry? I’m sorry you’re going to die soon, are you tired? I’m glad we’re in this together. Something about these professions strikes me as lonely, and the lonely life of a city tree, their myth contained in a square of wood chips at the base, their fate marked with orange spray paint. I think about my mom desperately trying to raise the trees in our previously barren backyard, disappointed when, as the seasons pass, she sees they’re not going to make it. Something about the fickle Minnesotan weather and our soil not being conducive to life. A city is no place for trees, I think, but it’s where they’re needed most.
 There is a tree on the lake my parents live near, Lake Harriet, that hosts a small wooden door at its base. The door is about four inches tall, painted wood, covering a hole in the tree through which people stuff notes. I can’t remember if it was supposed to be for fairies or for goblins or whatever mythical creature, but whatever it was, children (and some adults) would address it letters and leave them there. According to my parents, someone who lived on the lake would answer them. I don’t remember if I ever left a note in the tree, or how anyone would be able to answer the notes, or how old I was when my parents told me that it was a human who answered the notes and not fairies. I just remember walking around the lake, leaves ripely green in the belly of summer, noting the unassuming door in the tree at that point in our walk.
The birch tree in my front yard also had a magical quality to it. Tall and withered, it hung over the front porch like a benevolent giant watching the house. I got sad when my parents expressed fear that a branch would fall off during a storm and damage the house—my tree wouldn’t do that. The birch, massive and looming in shady lemonade days of summer and spindly in the snow-capped winter, had an enormous rut in the base. A large circle, the shape of an oval, that looked like someone has burned it there sacrificially. I made fairy houses in the rut, setting sticks into a tiny fort, adding feathers and nice rocks, a little piece of fruit. The birch was a constant growing up, a calming presence. My mom and I would sit in the porch, reading together, or playing gin rummy, as it stood sturdily overhead. I never had a sense of what would become of the both of them when I left for college, but you don’t notice these things until you’re gone.
I had a relationship with the trees surrounding my family’s cabin as a child, but there it was even more magical. I would build fairy houses in the wilderness of northern Minnesota, placing springy moss beds in rock crevices on the stream outside the cabin, collecting forest trinkets, shells, flowers, leaves, forming a perfect haven for some unseen creature. Lake Superior is one of the places I’m overcome by trees, and where I feel they’re meant to be; there’s no threat they’ll be felled, since the forest is protected. If city trees have lives and emails, the trees of the North Shore of Lake Superior have a mythology to them. Their myth is captured in the construction of the cabin itself: fallen lumber stacked sturdily, the cracks stuffed with fur and other grimy materials, makeshift glue. It was built generations ago, by an ancestor who helped found the forest and died there, in a chair the cabin still has, an enormous wooden frame covered in scratchy red wool cushions. There are old tobacco pipes on the walls, hidden canes and leather bags in the closets. I am imbued with the scent of pine when I go there. It overwhelms me, hiking up up up to where we can see the massive lake through breaks in the trees. 
 I don’t realize that I’m starved for trees until I’m around them again after being away from them for so long. I returned from my first semester at college to find an embarrassingly bare front yard: the birch tree had been cut down. My parents had told me that they were going to cut it down, but in person, the emptiness was palpable. “It was sick,” my mom told me. That’s what the burnt-out rut in the tree was, a sickness. Still, it’s hard to watch something go when you’ve grown so accustomed to its presence. I see this on her face as I board the Megabus again, promising to call. “‘Dear 1037148,’ wrote one admirer to a golden elm in May. “You deserve to be known by more than a number. I love you. Always and forever.”