When I was growing up in the Allegheny mountains of Western PA, and I was still a very small child, my father and I would seek out the sweet birch saplings. A good sapling was tall and lithe, but bent easily. Dad would bend a sapling down, and hold me on the end of it, letting me bounce up and down like a ride. A few days later, when we walked back through those same woods, the sapling was back upright and growing tall. It was no trouble for a birch to bend to give a small child a ride and then bounce right back up!
When I was 14, the a forest behind my house that I loved dearly was logged. For many years, my sorrow kept me out of that forest–I didn’t want to see it cut, I didn’t want to see my many tree friends gone. And…
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