The first warm days of spring take my mind to the Brigham City graveyard.

Not only because most of my ancestors are buried there. Graveyards honor old plants just as they do our dead. This astonishing stand of Dwarf Umbrella Trees made me fall instantaneously in love with Dwarf Catalpas. I planted as many as I could in residential landscapes, so that in twenty or thirty years, someone might have the same fascinated pleasure of discovery.

Here’s what they look like fresh from the nursery.

And this is a more mature specimen. It’s basically a lollipop which never gets taller than 15’. Such enormous leaves on
a very short tree!

If you’re interested, here’s a fine blog on the giant Catalpa trees (Catalpa bignonioides) that fathered these Dwarf Umbrella Trees (Catalpa bignonioides ‘Nana’).

Contemplating “dwarf” while standing near these trees humbles the mind much as contemplating the graves does. At least for me. Time gives and takes away. Time creates, and reclaims its creations.

Dwarf Umbrellas are just one of the many many fantastic plants thriving under the care of the Brigham City Cemetery groundskeepers, and the strong granite slopes of the Wasatch Range in Utah.

Come May, when the hundreds of yards of lilac hedges bloom, I hope to be there with my family, visiting our loved ones.

Who never really leave us. Who dwell in beauty. Like lilac fragrance, and rough bark.





I just learned, reading an account of my great-great grandfather's life, that he was sexton of this cemetery, beginning in 1881. Thomas Meikle Forrest. "The sexton has charge of the city cemetery and provides or supervises the care, maintenance, and beautification of the cemetery, and the digging of graves." This quote comes from my cousin Jean Tyson's account of T. M. Forrest's life. If the Dwarf Umbrella Trees are more than one hundred years old, my own great-great grandfather may have planted them. No wonder I was smitten at first sight!

I know there is a Forrest Street in Brigham City. Perhaps it was named for Thomas Meikle and his love of his namesake: trees.

If you want to feel the earth turn, this video is more time well spent . . .

_ Hundred-mile-an-hour wind gusts are fairly common in Boulder, Colorado, at least since I moved here. The gusts last night started around dark and walloped our cul-de-sac without mercy until noon today.

I slept approximately not at all.

The house shook,
the windows howled,
the fireplace flue played
the pan flute all night long.

_ This morning around five thirty I heard a little tap, a dainty scrape outside.
When I walked out my door at eight thirty, I saw this--

_ being held up by this--

_ engulfing both cars like this--

_ as nearly 8,000 pounds of pine tree blocked our driveway.

_ The arborist from Blue River Tree Care was already on the scene. He called in the largest crane that I have ever seen (and I’ve installed landscapes for 14 years)

which dropped a daredevil
down into the crown of the tree
who chopped two branches out
with a hand saw, attached the cables

and while we gaped from the upstairs landing window

that two-story pine tree

_ danced like a baby ballerina up over our heads

_ and touched down in point, where the crew promptly undressed her.

_ This miracle surpassed the miraculous activity indoors: my final day polishing
the last draft of my novel Tributary, 19.6 years in the making. Sharing the very last hours on this my magnum opus with the flight of the bumblebee pine tree--

I may have to take up the pan flute.
And play it hiking in the pines.

Hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday, I sang—heaven help me—“Rocky Mountain High." I pondered a Henry James novella I’d just read, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Because I wore brown-tinted sunglasses, the beetle-kill pines stood out on every slope, and I could not feel anything but implicated in and convinced of our changed planet.

In James’ story, the hero John Marcher misses the event of his lifetime. He feels chosen by an obscure destiny, waiting as if anointed for some beast to leap onto him and render his life profound. May Bartram, the only friend who knows of his obsession, stands beside him for decades, waiting, but Marcher’s self-absorption is so complete he only realizes when flinging himself on May’s grave that he has missed out on her love. That was his unrecognized beast.

The twists and turns of James’ syntax far exceed plot points, and I dismissed “The Beast in the Jungle” as a windy staid study in the human ego; profound—the beast is within not without us—and a dated sleeper written by a man who spent all his time indoors.

But as I hiked the thousand feet up toward Lake Helene, surrounded by vast browning slopes, the power of his novella came at me from an unexpected quarter, haunting my climb. James’ protagonist fit perfectly our environmental dilemma: we cannot really love the earth, though it offers itself, so we use it and simultaneously feel cut off from it, valuing our self-importance more than the opportunity to genuinely live, which makes us unable to stop pillaging, unable to stop missing the point, and we're just about to throw ourselves on its grave in misery and cowardice, like James' hero. Empty, when what is offered us is so full.

I have found no good way to face such a grand-scale environmental demise. Which leaves me in the Jungle with John Marcher.

Whatever you can do to plunge into this love, do it now.

You can't keep a good thing down.

It's nature's way. This tree, having endured heaven knows what death-dealing impact, sprang to life this spring, as trembly green and fragrant as all its compadres on the creek trail by the peacock farm at Greenbelt Meadows, near my home.

Ah, greenbelt. Ah, meadows. Ah, forming oneself around and with and through the blows dealt in the course of growing up. That is why I love trees: they don't mask their injuries, they capitalize on them, when they can.

My novel Tributary, the one that took twelve years and nearly a hundred drafts to complete, the one based on my Mormon pioneer ancestors, the one that's been sitting in a closet for six years recovering from the blow of non-interest by the publishing world, just sent trembly green and fragrant leaves out to dapple my trail. It has a publisher. Torrey House Press will print Tributary by Christmas.

Which makes me mighty glad.

Newsweek says this is The Mormon Moment. The Mormon Moment apparently extends to the literary world, as well. Stay tuned, as I'll be updating my website this summer—with photos and excerpts and such from Tributary—in preparation for the holiday launch.

Take heart. If you live through the heart-stopping difficulties, they can form and strengthen and even liberate you.

Life needs your sap, your dappling of the path, your instincts, your particular expression of this momentary joy.