The "Religion of Trees" class returned to the storm-damaged callery pear on 12th Street today. While I was the only person who'd been back to check on it since last week's class (...), I'd noticed that it had, in fact, grown back pretty valiantly. If they hadn't noticed its scars, that's because it wasn't just a wounded but a healed tree!
Perhaps I was too focused on the scars. Our reading had faulted citified people for exaggerating the negative consequences of felling trees.
Historians ... have for the most part ignored the role of wood. ... The foresters and carpenters who were the real experts were generally humble folk who left few written records, while the few people who did write about wood, such as Pliny the Elder and John Evelyn, were aristocrats and gentlemen with no real hands-on experience. These writers were apt to be swayed by their personal experience of seeing trees being felled, a highly dramatic process that is far more memorable than the almost imperceptible growth of the trees around us that occurs throughout our whole lifetime.
Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization (Scribner, 2020), 245
I confessed that I had never paid attention to that particular tree before the storm, giving them (generous!) cover for not having paid it much heed when drawing last week. This week's prompt was Wounded/healed tree. Compared to last week's drawings, you can really see the tree now.