This past summer I watched two dozen cedars slowly die outside my window in False Creek. In a matter of months, they turned from green to rust, stood like candles ready to be lit on a day of mourning. I watched men climb them with chainsaws, slice them, and feed them to the wood chipper. I sat behind my glass door in vigil. These trees have defined our horizon for as long as we have lived here. Each time I sit to write, we nod to each other across Sawyer’s Lane, cedars and I.
Before the stump grinder arrived a week later, there was a bouquet of flowers on one stump, a pair of shoes on another. I wasn’t alone in my mourning. During the summer of 2019 over a hundred cedars came down along False Creek. For months the saws screamed, the chippers shredded. Each time that triggered a chain reaction of worry and grief that has slowly been taking grip of me in all the devastation. More cedars are coming down today. Too dry for cedar, the sawyer said, when I asked. Too dry for cedar, in cedar country.
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All my life I have dragged bits of nature into my house—pebbles, shells, twigs, logs, twisted driftwood, rusty river rocks. As if they were life-giving. And they were. As if I needed them closer than outside. They remind me where life comes from. Coloured leaves, and four-leaf clovers I pressed decades ago, still fall out of the pages of books. As if they were not the outside, but more like the inside of what I call home. As if that is what books were made of. And they are. We are entangled with trees whether we acknowledge it or not, even if the only tree embrace some feel today is in the wood frames of their beds. In the lockdown of a pandemic I was advised that even five minutes under a tree will change my mood, and my outlook.
Read more of Children of the Trees by Daniela Elza on About Place Journal
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Daniela Elza lived on three continents before immigrating to Canada in 1999. She writes poetry and creative nonfiction. Some of her recent essays can be found in the Queen’s Quarterly, Riddle Fence, Grain Magazine, Motherwell, and The Tyee. Her latest poetry collections the broken boat (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2020) & slow erosions, a collaborated chapbook with Arlene Ang (Collusion Books, 2020) were published and launched under pandemic conditions. Daniela works as a Writing and Speech Arts teacher at the Bolton Academy for Spoken Arts.