regarding the trees

Here is a thing that I have discovered: I miss trees.

I am mainly not used to missing things, places in particular. Throughout my life my family has lived in no less than six different houses, and not only has this kind of desensitized me to house attachments, I actually start to get nervous and kind of weirded out when I spend more than two or three years in the same place. When I'm in Northampton I don't miss Maryland, and vice versa. But, as it turns out, I've never lived anywhere that was more of a city than a rather large town. Paris is definitely a city. And, as it turns out, I do miss something. I miss trees.

This isn't the only thing, really. I also miss grass that I'm allowed to stand on and being able to see the moon, and rain that lasts more than fifteen minutes at a time (this was actually really confusing, and my host family seemed rather shocked when I tried to explain that at home, sometimes it rains gently for two or three days at a time). But the most visible thing is probably the trees.

Trees in Paris, I think, are like animals in Paris. They are either in zoos, domesticated and confined, or suspiciously groomed. It's not that you don't see them on an everyday basis, but the ones that you do see seem weirdly isolated, set into squares in the sidewalks or encircled by those little metal cages. In some places, the trees - full-sized trees, mind you, not little shrubby things but big, upwards-of-twenty-years-old trees - are cut into squares. Like they just weren't neat enough before. I find this hilarious.

Or you can go to the parks, where you are not allowed to touch the grass but the trees are mainly unharmed, and which are about the only places where you can tell that seasons are actually changing. I go to parks a lot, mainly to sit and eat sandwiches, but if I don't go for a while I get kind of a shock when I arrive after a long absence, like, "Oh, dang, it really is the end of october. I hadn't really thought about it like that."

A while back we went to the Centre d'Arts et de Nature de Chaumont-sur-Loire, which is a large garden abutting a chateau and filled with various plant-related art installations.



Needless to say, I had a bit of a love spasm upon discovering the elaborate system of stairs and platforms wandering throughout the wooded part, complete with constant bird sounds and, awesomely, a mist machine that turned on every few minutes and filled the whole valley with dense fog. And I guess this establishes conclusively that I am fated to live in the middle of nowhere like a crazy hermit. I am pretty much okay with this.