I’m admittedly in a grumpy mood. Just up the street, the wonderful local tree guys have done the job they were paid to do: cut down a small forest of trees. It makes me feel so sad and so angry.

I’ve been reading this best seller book on how interrelated nature is. I read best seller after best seller and they all say the SAME thing: you cut down a tree, you affect the animals, the insects the ground, the fungi, the air, the water, light. If it’s one tree, 2 trees, if it’s done strategically, not clear cut, it’s a different story.

But you know all this. WHY doesn’t everyone?

It’s Saturday morning and I’m all in a huff. And I think back to – well, when my father was all in a huff. Which was seemingly every weekend afternoon when I was a teenager, when I would go riding with him.

Weekday early morning rides were quiet, calm, inner. But on weekends, we would ride in the afternoon, after a lunch preceded by a cocktail of some sort (for him).

On the ride he would unload about matters that mostly were disinteresting to me. But the ones that are still vivid were his upsets about Lisa. Lisa, who was the oldest and therefore the first to be a teenager:

She slumps!

She took a job in Washington, D.C instead of spending summer at home.

She brought home a despicable boyfriend.

I was a sounding board for his feelings of why all these were all terribly upsetting matters.

Unlike my 3 older siblings, I stayed home until I was 18. The girls high school I went to sent most of their graduates to local womens colleges where they might meet a southern boy at a nearby institution and get married soon after. But I chose to go to the University of Colorado, seeking mountains to climb.

I returned home the following summer, blasted by the whole new world I’d found outside my insulated world of small town Virginia.

That June, I got a phone call from one of the best friends I’d made in Boulder. Jim Nogami. a Japanese – American. He was working for a politician in Washington that summer. I invited him to come to weekend lunch and he accepted.

Jim arrived, his hair down to his waist, and I invited him in to the living room to “have a drink” before lunch. My father, sitting at the far end of the couch, did not even put down his newspaper to greet him. Jim, not knowing him and not knowing what to expect just took a seat and we chatted.

I don’t know at what moment my father deigned to lower his paper. But, somehow or other, Jim’s mild manner and politeness took away my father’s defenses. Little by little, conversation started until I was left out of the loop.

Jim and my father ended the lunch time gathering good friends. Afterwards, my father would ask about him. where is your that boy in DC? I don’t think Jim returned to the East coast for work again.

But… my father so calm after a young man visited? How had that happened? It stood out for me.

A little patience. Respect. And then conversation.

And maybe, for the trees:

conservation.

(Yes! – Peaches)

(looking out at March snow)