How to Listen to Trees

My strength is trust

Photo by John P. Weiss

Near the end of her life, Mary loved to flip through a photography book of Ireland.

The book was large, and filled with stunning, colorful photos. From the rocky, vertiginous Cliffs of Moher and rolling, fertile fields and hillocks of the backcountry, to the bustling shops of Dublin’s Grafton Street and divine sunsets above the iconic Blarney Castle and Gardens.

It was Mary’s favorite book. A time capsule to the past, when she was a young Irish lass, and life was simple and people could settle into the rhythm of their lives.

I’d sometimes sit with Mary, my grandmother, and watch as she’d silently point at a photo here or there.

She was in her mid-nineties, mostly uncommunicative, her mind lost to wherever we go in the fog of dementia. The prominent veins in her hands hid beneath paper-thin skin. Skin that would often tear open with the slightest brush against a table edge.

Mary used to live in a little apartment in town, but when her decline started, my parents moved her in with us. My mother was her primary caretaker.

When I sat with her, I would gaze at her cloudy eyes.

What was she thinking? Where was she? And why were her favorite photos in the Ireland book always of trees? Sometimes she’d…