The Green People

What follows is a story first printed in Teesha Moore's The Studio 'zine quite a few years ago, later reprinted at my website.  I don't think I've shared it here before.  Please excuse the spacing, it is too late in the day/century to try and fix it.

My family had two sides, the indoor and the outdoor. When I went on vacation with the indoor grandparents, we visited people. With my own parents and the outdoor faction, we visited trees. The trees we went to see more than any others were the giant redwoods of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, both within picnic distance of the San Joaquin Valley farm where my father grew up. Their family recreation had always been going to the mountains; simple drives, picnics, hiking, camping. The Sierras were their back yard. When my father had a family of his own, we followed the same path. Up we'd drive, watching the altitude signs along a winding road that passed rocky vistas and high mountain meadows. Eventually we would reach the trees, always finding a spot beneath their ceiling to have our lunch. We sat in dappled sunlight, filtered spots bright as coins dotting our clothes and bodies. The sound at ground level was the noise of skittering creatures. Higher up, soaring branches tall enough to touch the wind played the forest's unique music, a source of deep peace. Over the years our vacations and my father's writing assignments took us all around California. Trees awaited us at every destination. We came to know the oaks of the Mother Lode, the Monterey cypress, windbreaks of eucalyptus on the coastal plain. We were introduced to the bristle cone pine in our local mountains, date palms and Joshua "trees" in the desert, orchards, timber stands and cottonwoods turning with the season. Sometimes my father would despair of his children as we read comic books in the station wagon's back seat instead of looking out the windows. What he didn't know was that all the information, all the sights and stories and impressions reached us anyway. We learned the names of the towns and the rivers and felt ourselves among friends in the woods. We were still quite young when my father tried to tell us, partly in words, what trees meant to him. It was a December evening, we'd taken our Christmas tree from the car and it waited on the lawn as my mother readied its spot in the front window. My father called us to form a circle around the fir as light from the open front door spilled over us. We joined hands and danced, actually skipped, around the tree, he singing some version of a Christmas song. It was unlike anything we'd ever seen him do and we laughed from the surprise and the joy of it. "I've always thought I was a druid," he said, explaining, simplifying.   "They were people whose religion was about nature. " Then the dance began again and we declared we were all druids, sisters and brothers of the forest, children of the trees.