They cut down my trees while I was out of town. And at first, I honestly thought I was losing my mind. Not metaphorically, not in some dramatic way. I mean, I stood in my own backyard staring at sunlight where there had never been sunlight before, trying to remember if maybe, just maybe, I had imagined those trees all along, but I hadn’t. I knew those trees.
I planted two of them myself. The other ones had been there longer than I had. Tall oaks that swayed just enough in the wind to sound like the ocean at night. The kind of trees that make a place feel settled, like it belongs to itself. And now they were gone. Just gone. Only four pale raw stumps left behind.
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