“Man was created a little lower than the angels, and has been getting lower ever since.”
~Josh Billings
“The elephant can survive only if forests survive.”
~Mark Shand

Memory is a funny thing isn’t it? So fragile, yet what would we be without it? Empty. Someone once told me, “What you remember, you remember. What you forget, you forget.” It is in this spirit I tell you my story.  To start, let me tell you, I was a very skeptical child. I rarely believed the “nonsense” other children believed. Screw the fairies, it was science all the way. I loved math and despised the Easter bunny. I hated playing “princess”, I would rather pretend I was a doctor to my stuffed bears and turtles.

We, my parents and myself, lived in a small brick house on a hid-away street. It was a small abode, but the backyard always seemed huge. It had green grass that looked like something out of a cartoon. There was a play set with double yellow plastic swings. I loved swinging. Being a aquarius, which is an air sign, I makes sense that I could happily spent my days catapulting myself into the sweet freshly mowed grass smelling air.

  I cannot remember why, but this particular day I was mad at my parents. Being I stubborn kid, I expected them to read my mind rather them telling them I was angry. When they could not, I walked out of our house and climbed into the swing. I swung my heart out. Fueled by anger, my energy level was high, and it seemed like I “flew” for hours. After the poor swing had taken the bout of my frustration, I flung myself onto the grass. Having been warmed by the sun all day, it felt safe and comforting. There was dew on it or maybe the sprinklers had just turned off, either way the grass was wet. I remember staring up at the support-beams of the play set. A single orb spider had woven a web. The silky strands caught the light and reflected dances of light onto the red wood. The sky was painfully blue. It looked as if one more drop of sapphire fell into the pool of the sky, it would break, like when a rock hits a window.

There was also, in my backyard, a tree. A black walnut tree.  Every fall it would shed walnuts as it shed leaves. Every spring I would collect the walnuts from the previous year and dye random scraps of fabric. The walnut-to-water ratio was always off, because god forbid if I used a recipe. My fingers would always turn green or brown, like a henna stain. That particular day, the trees branches seem to enclose me in lushness.

Like I said before, memory is a funny thing. Especially childhood memories. Add imagination to this and you have a pot of tall tales. You can interpret what I saw. I will tell you what I remember. As I was laying in the grass, I heard music. Beautiful, otherwordly music.  It was the music that you hear in a clear running stream, and in the wind in the trees. Not the shrubs they call trees, here in New Mexico, but real trees. Tall and magnificent.  Where just for a second, you hear something, and for the rest of the day you contemplate; was it real?

Again, I was a doubtful child, and assumed that my mother was playing something in the house, that the sound flowed through the open kitchen window. I looked up and the music stopped. Now I was curious. I slowly layed my puzzled head back down on the grass. Suddenly, as if a magical conductor waved his baton, which looks at lot like a wand, it started again. I looked back up at the tree. The leaves stretched out as if to encompass me into a great secret. Then I saw her.

A maiden, who was as graceful as the tree itself, floating in a ray of light. She had a crown of green leaves and little white flowers around her head. She was wearing a robe that was pure white and a over cloak that looked like the crayon labeled “green-yellow.”  The fabric looked airy and light, as it hovered around her ankles, where her feet were bare. She had divine lemon hair that looked light the sun had birthed the golden strands. She was marvelous. She looked like a queen of old.

I don’t know what she said to me, or even if she was real. She was as real as the things she said to me. But I do know that when the spell was broken, lord knows by what, I sat in the grass. Pondering life and trees. Questioning my skepticism. Wondering if I should tell my mother. Most of all marveling about what had just happen to me. The only thing my little Christian mind could come up with, was an angel. So an angel she was. A guardian angel of the trees.

From then on, I have always had a profound interest in trees. It is worth mentioning that from then on, my doubts and apprehension of everything went out the window. If angels were real, so were fairies, if fairies were real so were gnomes, and so on.

When I went to middle school, we learned about forests. Naturally, it broke my little tree hugging heart to know that they were collapsing. World Wildlife Foundation says, “46-58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year—equivalent to 36 football fields every minute.” That’s horrible, but the thing that really got me was that nobody seemed to care. Sure, there was the occasional activist, but in general nobody did anything.

I have tried to join Greenpeace at least three times. Of course, thirteen is too young to be tree sitting, so I was turned down. After two more times, it finally got knocked into my stubborn little head that 18+ is the age minimum.

Do I want to spend the rest of my life an activist? Hell no! Yet, the way I see it, caring is half the battle. For example, Ms. Bannerman, loves teaching. If all her students die off because of carbon-dioxide poisoning or climate change or whatever, Ms. Bannerman will be sad. I don't want poor Ms. Bannerman to be sad. So, I care. 

It’s like when somebody needs a ride to, I don't know, pick a place. Nobody wants to take that geeky boy to that place but eventually someone will stand up and raise their hand. After them, more people will  volunteer, and stand up, until the whole room of people are on their feet. If that original person did not stand up the others would not have. People are lemmings, sheep. Luckily for the “angel,” people are coming to their senses. People are standing. People are rising. I don't care why, or how, but just that they are.

So when you asked me to write a narrative, you wanted something that will make you laugh, something light. Guess what? Life isn’t always light. You really want something that will make you sit in your armchair and justify the consuming and the erasing of the Earth. So do I. But we can't ignore this. The angels are calling. So, I ask you this, will you rise?