We were tree shopping at a garden center, back when things were normal. They had a posted list of good full-sun trees for planting, and this alerted us to the existence of something called a Contorted Filbert. You don't bring up anything called a Contorted Filbert in front of my family without expecting follow-up questions. We had plenty for the young man who was hauling bags of whatever, and he dutifully took us to their collection. It did not disappoint. To wit:

That's a fucking tree right there. I've planted three trees in our yard, the first a tulip magnolia I got for my wife a year or so ago and the second a red maple we got around the same time as Filbert there. The magnolia's blooms are lovely, and you kind of have to be dead inside not to love a good maple, but Filbert is the the most YA-fiction of them all, and therefore the favorite. I need to see if Hot Wheels ever made a Ford Anglia so I can nestle one in his branches while he's still tiny.

Trees have become a serenity-adjacent thing for me over the last several years. It started when I was working a job so terrible that I spent my daily commute home trying to talk myself down from being angry. I was at a stoplight one afternoon and casting about for anything remotely soothing to focus on when I looked up and saw a 40-foot oak twisting in the wind. Watching it stand there and vigorously contradict itself somehow felt like medicine. It got in my blood. I've been watching trees ever since.

I'm told that the effect may have something to do with my ADD gorging on the infinitely various depths and orientations of a tree's thousands of surfaces. It might also be a symptom of being a programmer in a world in which even non-technical people are choking on glowing pieces of glass. Whatever it is, Filbert gives it out with both hands. What he lacks in size, he makes up for in arthritic dervish and sproinging. I can't wait to see him full grown, but I'm happy he's in no hurry to get there.

A tree is deliberation and dance and shelter and time and undeniable, down-to-the-core-of-being fact. At bottom, a tree simply is. It is also quiet, and quiet is a rarer commodity than toilet paper to my pinball mind and tinnitus ears. So as I train myself to embrace a life that might never again know true silence, I fill my pockets with bits of second-hand quiet that I steal from sleeping dogs and trees.

Especially lately. Quarantine has managed to make our lives somehow both simpler and more difficult. If it can't be done from here, we try to do without. Running an errand feels like a terrifying vacation. The only time I feel fully at ease away from home is walking the dog after city curfew, when it might as well be an hour before dawn. I step as quietly as I can through our sleeping neighborhood and do my best to let everything go. I look up at the branches, stained orange by the streetlights, hopeful that they will help to unknot what the day has spent coiling and twisting within me. Most days they do the job. Most days they remind me that, whatever else is happening, places of stillness and open-ended possibility are still near to hand.

I need that reminder, and I need to remember that there are things with deep roots, things with longer lives than my whiplash vacillations between ego and self-doubt. Things that laugh at how temporary my concerns are. Filbert will be around after I'm gone, unless nature or the next homeowner proves to be unkind to him. While I'm feeding the soil of a small Ozarks cemetery, he'll be here standing watch, just off the southwest corner of the deck, perfectly placed for people to point at him and ask, "What the hell kind of tree is that?"