The Chippewa people called this first lunar cycle of the New Year "Earth Renewal Moon." Fittingly, the snow goose was their totem in the animal world, and the birch tree their plant kingdom totem. 

Some of my best friends over the years have been trees. They populate my waking and dreaming hours alike. I have climbed them, lounged and even slept in their enfolding branches, fallen out of them, taken refuge and confided in them, planted them by the hundreds and, yes, even hugged them. Oh, how I have hugged them! What could be sweeter than to wrap your arms around a spicy Western cedar or a smooth, grandmotherly sycamore and listen to her naughty secrets? 

One of my earliest recollections is being rescued by my father out of a  giant backyard walnut tree in Southern California -- clambering high up into those inviting limbs was a snap, but getting down was a puzzlement. I was probably four or five at the time but already I had begun my romance with wood. 

As the leaves sail away upon fierce autumn gales, it is once again possible to admire the intricate silhouettes in our deciduous woods. Can there be anything more pleasing than to view the outline of a mature oak or hickory against the backdrop of a fiery sunrise or sunset? A close second would be a well-stocked woodshed, with a winter's worth of neat rows of tinder dry firewood stacked to the roofline. 

I am still toting a canvas wood carrier made for me long ago by a Vermont friend on which she had silk screened a gem of ancient domestic wisdom, penned, she said, by an anonymous English poet: 

      A Word on Firewood

      Beachwood fires are bright and clear

      If the logs are kept a year.

      Chestnut's only good, they say,

      If for long 'tis laid away.

      But ash new or ash old

      Is fit for queen with crown of gold. 

      Birch and fir logs burn too fast,

      Blaze up bright and do not last.

      It is by the Irish said

      Hawthorne bakes the sweetest bread.

      Elmwood burns like churchyard mold,

      E'en the very flames are cold.

      But ash green or ash brown

      Is fit for queen with golden crown. 

      Poplar gives a bitter smoke,

      Fills your eyes and makes you choke.

      Applewood will scent your room

      With an incense like perfume.

      Oaken logs, if dry and old,

      Keep away the winter's cold.

      But ash wet or ash dry

      A king shall warm his slippers by. 
 

A quick inventory of my worldly goods reveals the ridiculous extent to which wood has stolen into my house as well as my heart. The furniture, the floors, the lamps, the kitchen countertops, bowls, all my preferred stirring and spreading implements, even my favorite pen (made by a friend from a thousand-year old Italian olive branch) confront me with the distinct personalities of differing wood species. It is like being surrounded by pictures of deceased but still eloquent ancestors -- since they can't tell you their stories, it's up to you to invent narratives from the clues life inscribed on their bodies and faces in wrinkles and scars (or wood grain and wormholes, in this case.) 

On the way home from Dodgeville recently I was admiring a clump of late-turning, brilliant yellow larches, which weren't distinguishable among other conifers earlier in the season. There aren't larches at all in the woods closest to my home and I believe they're fairly rare around here.  This got me thinking about the grand historic species that have passed from the scene in my lifetime: the stately elm and the magnificent American chestnut, most notably. As I write, the Sitka spruce forests of the far north are dying fast, victims of the new enemy -- climate change. And if John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt hadn't teamed up to protect the sequoia gigantea, those stupendous, cathedral-like redwoods would be gone, too --  not fallen to disease or global warming, but to human insistence on using up every last bit of everything, whether it be fish, gold, oil, passenger pigeons, land, trees, or what have you. 

The Neville Museum in Green Bay displays a mural blown up from a mid-19th Century photo showing one remaining stand of Wisconsin old growth white pine. The pines had escaped the axe up to then but were about to be felled, the last survivors in a sea of stumps. The size of those elders stops your breath. And afterward makes you weep. Never again will any of us dwarves have the honor and privilege of sauntering through 500-year old groves of Wisconsin white pine and be put in our rightful, humble place in the natural scheme of things. 

Wood is a renewable resource when forests are managed properly. That forests are not managed properly is no longer really debatable, is it? I flinched to pass an ugly clear-cut woodlot along Highway 23 last year, knowing that never have healthy forests been so crucial to propping up the ailing planet. They are an acknowledged agent of earth renewal. They clean our air of noxious properties and add the good stuff back in. They will shade us from rising temperatures in summer, heat our homes in winter, provide houses and food for a host of other creatures, beautify our landscapes, hold our soil in place and contribute spoons for stirring the soup pot, if given half a chance. Our survival as a species depends in large part on the health of our forests, and our ability to learn a new way of working with trees, not against them. Else, the next mass death may be that of homo not-so-sapiens. 

      Essays are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree. ~apologies to Joyce Kilmer