Chapter 1
I live inside the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest in the lower 48. The ponderosas bear extreme climates–very cold and very snowy, some winters, and pretty hot and pretty dry, some other winters. They grow so tall, so slowly you might miss their abundant accumulations in both height and thickness. In this ponderosa pine forest, it may snow a hundred and fifty inches a year. Those winters snow collects in layers like the Kaibab, Coconino, Supai, and Navajo sandstones that have layered the Colorado Plateau over the last 100 to 300 million years. But unlike that long-lived stone, the snow turns over, year by year. It falls in chunks. It melts before the branches break. Seventy-five mile-an-hour winds bend the trees over, their branches touching ground, like excellent yogi. A slight shift in wind turns those yogi to catapults–the snow flies. Incoming.

Chapter 2
How do mothers know things they couldn't possibly know? When she asked me that question, my body, inside and outside, seemed on full display: my genitals, my uterus, my breasts, my face, my eyes. I wanted to disappear, to fly from my bedroom window into the field and even beyond the field, up Little Cottonwood Canyon, over Park City, to Wyoming where my mother had been raised, and where my great-grandmother lived, and I could hide out there until the rest of the story resolved itself without me, but imaginations do not have the substantial wingspan to lift our human bodies. This chapter describes the effort my mom took in trying to rebuild my self-esteem and to ensure that the one path I went down wasn't just the path of iniquity. Sure, it looks grim from the outset-both the climate and the prospects of an impregnated 11-year-old-but there are solutions, more than one. This chapter is a way of orientating the reader towards the author's way of looking at how what can look like choice, often isn't. This book charts the course of my family's decision to move to the foothills of Salt Lake City--a move that feels like a narrowing of choices. But, as the associated stories show, the history of places, especially the story of Indigenous people, stands as a corrective. Our homes are where we make them and, conversely, this place is not ours to call home.

Chapter 3
What I want from telling my story is what I want from a painting. I want to move into the paint itself and become part of the image. This is a kind of hiding but it's also a kind of presence, however abstract and muted the brush strokes might make it. In this painting of my dreams, I want to part the brushstrokes, open them wide, and step between their oily certainty. I want to be part but not the whole of the story. I want to be on even ground with the other figures in the painting-tree, human, stone. I want to be configured. When the neighbor across the street sexually interferes with me, the story becomes refracted into fragments. Like Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, Shonto Begay's paintings of trees, and Rebecca Campbell's paintings of trees--being able to tell a story is a gift I struggle with. I imagine if I lived inside these paintings of trees, perhaps the trees would offer me some demonstrative lessons in explaining how to tell an inviting story.

Chapter 4
Although I grew up between the mouths of Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons where Douglas Fir and Cedars decorate the granite canyons, I didn't know the inside real forests until I visited the uncut expanses of the Old Growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, or, later, moved to the Ponderosa Forest. My mom, no matter what else had changed in our family since my cousin Trev and I climbed the plum and cherry trees, still called me a druid. I moved to Portland for college. Perhaps this would be the full restoration of the forest that had been obliterated in my childhood. For a time, it seemed possible. I saw true old growth forest. I met people who liked me for my personality. I saw what happened to old growth forest that didn't burn. It was clearcut for commercial purposes.

Chapter 5
Mt. Bachelor, where Gabe and Kris and I camped, is on the drier side of the Cascades, near Bend, where it rains about the same amount as Salt Lake City and Flagstaff, about 11 inches per year, and yet we emerged from our backpacking trip drenched. The garbage bags meant to serve as waterproof covers kept our clothes and sleeping bags dry not well at all. Gabe's lips were still slightly blue when we got back to the car, but I liked the cold forest. Even when the trees were still, I could feel something happening. Little dots, coming together. Trees, water, and climate become even more important in this chapter. Andy, who becomes my primary college boyfriend, is loquacious unlike me. It's not until we break up that I see how his garrulous qualities were a means to an end--a way to build a personality, a way to build a story. Similarly, humans are finding ways of building new environments out of human waste all the time. I learn more about mycorrhizal fungi and how they sustain forests.

Chapter 6
I didn't quit smoking right then. Instead, I moved back to Salt Lake where the smoking began and my sisters and mom were and to the part of town, close to the university where I would go to graduate school, to the same neighborhood my parents had wanted to move back when I was in third-grade-–the first moment where things had gone wrong for our family. But now I would move there. After my dad dies from alcoholism, it becomes urgent to tether myself to family and community. The trees of Utah are different from the trees of the northwest but they offer their own lessons.

Chapter 7
I was on my way to a meeting at the University in Michigan where I had just begun my first tenure track teaching job when Erik called me from our pediatrician's office.
“We are driving to the hospital. The doctor almost ordered an ambulance for Zoe. I told him I could drive there fast.” It was hard for me to decide about kids-both in the what-if-what-happened-to-me-happened-to-them and also is it fair to bring kids into this climate-troubled and reproductive-rights imperiled world. This chapter digs deeply into what body autonomy means beyond reproductive rights. When my daughter was admitted to the hospital for RSV, I chose to take her home against medical advice. What does this mean about who gets to decide what for whom?

Chapter 8
I took it with a grain of salt. I put it in perspective. I balanced what might have happened with what we knew as facts. One day, the day care Max attended moved next door to Melissa's dad's house because he had just had surgery. She needed to be close. Could she still care for six children, ages one, Max's age, to five? The five-year-old was Zoe's close friend. A year younger than Zoe who just started Kindergarten, this friend still needed daycare. When my son Max's daycare center closed in the middle of the day, I got a phone call to pick him up. Then, I got another phone call informing me that the son of the daycare owner had been arrested for molesting a child. I think about what child molestation means in our culture at large. Is there something particularly wrong with the human ecosystem? Is there a way to set it right?

Chapter 9
Real healing, I believe, is in making the world better than it left you. You can start with the self but at some point, your own story gets a little worn. Your singular narrative is a groove in a record that you know all the words to. If your story is going to matter, it has to matter 'out there.' Inviting people to write about their own stories and reading them is one way to knit yourself into a community. If healing is only an individual endeavor, then is there a question that the world is so messed up? But even as one tries to build a community, to add good to the world, to multiply the available reality, you'll still mess it up sometimes, usually for trying too hard. I write about things I shouldn't, disappoint friends I wish I hadn't, overstep in ways only someone who thinks they're not being heard shouts too loud.

Chapter 10
I understand the compulsion, when the stories get too complicated, when there are too many of them and too many possibilities, why so much fallen dried out detritus of too many bad experiences and no real sense of how this forest mattered anyway would make one want to burn it all down. Depression leads to a kind of indecision. Severe depression and suicidal ideation lead to thinking there is only one solution. Sometimes, staying with the trouble means not being able to get out of the trouble. I understand that when you get stuck in a single narrative, that too can be a trap. If your is your story is your story is your story, how do you get off the path that was destined if not for your own destruction, then your own desolation? As I watch a fire encroach on the town in which I live, I wonder at the vulnerability made by humans. The forests are so much more vulnerable to fire than they once were. At the same time, I consider my aunt who died, alone and sick, made incredibly vulnerable by growing up to be only a caregiver to my grandmother. There is supposed to be a family, a community that supports you when you don't have the resources to do it yourself but it seems we've pulled the rug out from under our most vulnerable people. We have, simultaneously, made it impossible for forests to heal themselves, to stop the fires on their own.

Chapter 11
My post-rape psychologist told my mom I was very book smart but not terribly street smart. Since I'd recently failed the gifted and talented test, I didn't quite believe him about the book smart comment, but I didn't quite believe him about the street smarts comment either. What did he know about streets? He was a psychologist. Had he been to see The Massacre Guys at the Indian Center? What kind of piercings did he boast (I just had regular piercings but sometimes stuck safety pins through my ear-holes. Very street.) In this penultimate chapter, I attempt to strike out on my own. I paddle alone into Lake Mary, with my dog on the back of my board. I am buffeted by wind. I look at trees and forests and how they adapt and manage to save themselves. As the trees move westward, absorbing carbon as they go, I studies amaranth plants to learn how they do some uber-sucking carbon from the atmosphere. As I nearly drown and my husband saves me, I end up with that frustrating and true fact-there isn't a single answer, love is complicated, and so is chemistry.

Chapter 12
The planet is not out of balance itself. It doesn't care how much carbon is stored underground or in the atmosphere. Chemical equations by definition work out. You've got to put the H's somewhere. Someone's going to organize those Os. The earth's crust is a giant sponge. So is its atmosphere. It will absorb whatever we dish out. But for the living things on the planet, we're not quite ready to reorganize our relationship to oxygen, hydrogen, carbon. We try. The trees are moving west. They're moving up the hill. Javelinas are moving to new neighborhoods. Birds have started staying home for the winter. Because humans cannot stay put, now everybody has to reconsider their home grounds, their roots, their ancient territories. Love is complicated. My husband Eric and I look to the trees for a possible metaphor to help us make that narrative, we see how the trees sacrifice for each other. They communicate endlessly with one another. That's what makes it likely that the trees will survive the humans-they sweat the details.