This is for the kids who can hear the trees.
The way they cry, those corpses in the logging trucks on the highways of our family vacations. The kids that never, ever made the trucker horn signal at the log-truck driver.
This is for the kids who never threw a rock because it might hurt the tree, the water, the Earth. The kid who didn’t want to dent the world.
This is for the kids that left the flowers growing and laid down beside them so they wouldn’t be lonely. But told their friends their bouquets were beautiful and meant it.
This is for the kids who would swear they heard the trees. And for the trees that swore they heard the kids. For the ones that climb and the ones that hug. The ones that hide and the ones that seek. This is for the kids who know the difference between a cedar and a fir and the ones who don’t but they know breath and beauty when they see it. The ones that pulled the bark off the eucalyptus then tried to put it back and cried. This is for the kids who are nurse logs. This is for kids we’ve felled. This is for the stumpy ones and the leggy ones, the single-trunk and branchy ones. The evergreens and the ones who need a three-month break every year.
This is for the knowledge that our culture is cutting us down as fast as the rainforest.
This is for every kid who takes a picture looking up through the branches because perspective matters. And the ones that tried to hug a redwood and can still remember the scent of that moment, pressing their face harder against the trunk to reach as far as possible around the unhuggable tree.
This is for the one that stood in the forest and thought that scattering woodchip for trails that pass by trees makes us monsters.
This is for the ones who think and think again before they cut.
This is for the trees who heard the people talking about the chainsaw’s need for fuel.
And the kids who begged them not to.