Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Sumana Roy is the author of numerous books, including How I Became a Tree and My Mother's Lover and

Other Stories. In this essay, Sumana is unsettled by her young nephew's insistence on watering

dead trees. As he tries to understand the difference between life and death, the visible and the invisible,

Sumana meditates on the continuance of all that has vanished from our sight.

My nephew, nine years old, is watering the plants on the terrace with me.

His two-year-old sister is playing apprentice.

One must learn this too, how to water plants, a skill we take to be as naturally acquired as chewing or walking.

She waters every potted plant I water, following me with her small plastic cup, a whole-hearted

second helping.

I try to explain and then stop.

She's too young to identify thirst.

Her brother is the opposite.

He waters everything except the plants.

The cane chairs and table, the tiles on the walls, a clay horse, a rock

or two, clothes lines, and quite often, just himself. He does this when I'm looking away,

or I'm at a distance from him, watering the Bougainvillea plants in the corner.

P, he tells me, I just water this.

He calls me Pee, his diminutive for Pishi, aunt.

Why? I almost scream.

...