Winter is Coming #2: Wood
The art and pleasure of living with trees
Welcome to my 2024 series, Winter is Coming. Posts in this series are available to paid supporters of my writing, while the majority of my other posts will continue to be published for all subscribers. If you’d like to read along and support my creative work, you can do that right here:
My experience in Montana has always been linked to trees.
When I was very young, my parents bought property with a tiny cabin and a cherry orchard. We lost the orchard a few years later due to a savage freeze, and my father began a decades-long quest to replant the area with evergreen trees (often with my help). (I wrote a little more about this upbringing here.) Here I am with one of the first trees planted, in around 2nd grade. Today, that tree towers high above my head.
But despite being surrounded by (and in some cases, working with) the trees, I never really spent much time being aware of the forest around me.
When we embarked on our Montana adventure, that all changed.
While living in our Airstream on our friend’s property in 2017, we began our immersion in the tutorial of the woods and all that it provides.
Our introduction to the woods took shape in a few ways, long before the time when wood became the heart and soul of our home and our hearth (a subject for a future essay) Here’s how our discovery unfolded, in four chapters: