It's a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Pine

I'm going to tell you something I'm not sure I've confessed to you before and it feels like I'm laying my heart bare to say it. I think of trees as my friends. I talk to the trees. I flee to the trees. When my soul needs peace, I've often found it among the trees, anywhere I can get lost in a canopy overhead, the air softer and cooler, my footfall stifled by the forest floor. I don't know how much of this was due to growing up near a busy intersection in Cleveland, longing for the green of suburbia. I was still just a kid when my family moved to a smaller town, to a house ringed by maple trees. I remember one day passing a construction site where workers were paving over a huge green lot to put up a department store. I teared up from the back seat at the site of all that grass disappearing. When we got married and settled in Columbus for nearly a decade, I made peace with living in a densely populated area because our place bordered an old, abandoned estate. Its towering trees and overgrown acreage gave me enough of an illusion of green as my view, it brightened my breeze, it housed my flocks of birds and squirrels and raccoons across the fence of my tiny back yard. It would make do, I thought, until I could make it to a bigger yard with my own trees someday. And then one day in March bulldozers appeared and started clear-cutting my forest. In three days not one tree, not one sprig of the honeysuckle that grew higher than the first floor of my home was left. An apartment building went up behind my home, with high beam security light poles up against our fence, lighting up our home around the clock. The animals fled. We'd had a number of reasons by then to move, but that was the confirmation. Watching me live in denser and denser urban surroundings is like keeping something wild in a smaller and smaller cage, I suppose. I don't mean that I am in any way able to go live out in the wild — I am no Grandma Gatewood — but I must be able to breathe it in. Within months, we relocated to a house between Lake Erie and the river, surrounded by trees. I was sold the minute I opened the back door to find a huge old maple in the backyard with low branches perfect for climbers and a dangling yellow swing. This is what I wanted for my kids. Their bedroom windows looked right into her leaves that turned into a wall of golden light come fall. Our entire yard was covered by her glorious shade. She soon held a treehouse hung with Nerf guns and old ice cream buckets full of foam bullets for waging war on those passing underneath. The swing was outgrown, then replaced, and eventually swinging rope chairs were added. She stood sentry over every trampoline jump, outdoor movie night, every campfire and ghost story and birthday party. She was the best tree, loyal and true. Last year, something was beginning to go wrong. Some of her branches didn't bud out like the others. This year she seems to have given up the ghost completely. The tree has been such a fixture in our lives, in the landscape of our daily living, that I am bereft of reason: Do I have to move, I wondered, and perhaps not idly considering I left my last house because of losing trees. In the midst of this came Mr. Pine. This week I received an email from the Lorain Public Library directing me to pick up something I reserved. I thought nothing of it until I went in Thursday and discovered it came in a bag and needed refrigerating: a small red cedar seedling. It was a gift from the Neighborhood Forest project, which annually gives away trees to kids to encourage urban and residential planting. This year, the organization distributed more than 30,000 trees throughout North America during Earth Week. I know Mr. Pine — what my daughter immediately named it — will not grow to the size of our dying maple in my lifetime. We will plant Mr. Pine together as soon as we can find a good spot out back. We're going to put a tiny fence around him, give him proper soil and make sure he's watered. Sort of like I do as a parent. But that's the thing about a tree, isn't it? We plant them knowing full well their shade really won't be for us. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.