I'm Italy Mone and this is the Slowdown.

I've recently written a very long prose piece about trees.

I just kept writing about them and it seemed to go on forever.

My love of trees, my memory of trees, the way they feel like family members and

sisters, markers of time, ways of healing, ways of breathing.

The only issue with the essay really is that I don't know how to end it because if you're

writing about trees, the subject is endless.

I'm part of a small group of writers that meets and talks about our prose writing and

they had to listen to me read my piece on trees for months.

While everyone else would move on to their new smart essays, I'd say, well, here's more

about trees.

And that was it.

Just more about trees.

I couldn't stop.

Finally, I think it might be done.

But the only way I could finish it was to admit that it could go on forever.

When I told my producer, Jennifer, about this project of mine, she brightened over our

Zoom screen and her first response was, do you ever wonder what makes a tree happy?

And this is why we get along.

Come for the poetry, stay for the trees.

In today's poem, we see someone with a similar deep connection to a tree.

I love the tenderness felt for the tree and I love the question of whether or not the

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