That Arboreal conference was five years ago, which is the kind of time you can say is nothing at all or you can say it’s been so long or say it feels like yesterday. But it doesn’t feel like yesterday and maybe that’s why I’m thinking about it instead of everything else. The funeral is in five days, though of course we were encouraged to call it a Celebration of Life. The things I need to think about are color scheme and program font and who should speak and when will the photos play if we decide to do a slideshow and how big to blow up the other photos if we decide to do prints. I need to think about these things, but instead, I keep thinking about trees.

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      When I arrived at the Arboreal conference, I bought a book called Tree Love so I would fit in with everyone clutching worn copies to their chests, as if the pages needed to be kept warm to stay alive.

      “Imagine if your favorite book was made out of your favorite tree,” I said to one woman, and she looked at me, appalled. In the signing line, a man asked, “What trees do you most want to save?”

      The second I said, “The redwoods,” I meant it. Wasn’t I the girl who cried when they cut down the slippery elm in the median on Highway 71. I absolutely wanted to save the redwoods. I absolutely wanted to save all trees.

      I attended the talk by the author of Tree Love. For an hour we were startled by facts that humanized trees. We learned that young trees continue to nourish ancient stumps by pumping sugar into their roots.

      “Like a child looking after a parent with Alzheimer’s,” the scientist-author said. “But for five hundred years.”

      “I have a deal with my kid,” the woman beside me whispered. “The minute they start pumping me with Jell-O, you pull the plug. None of this five hundred years shit.”

      “To ensure the bees come to the male willows first,” the scientist-author said, “the trees make bright yellow catkins. Think of them as open signs, the flashing, fluorescent kind.”

      “My husband would need more than that,” the woman beside me whispered.

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      What else: oaks are protective. When a predator bites into an oak leaf, the tree dispenses bitter tannins into its own leaves while sending electric pulses through interconnected roots warning the neighbors and children to do the same.

      And here’s a fact that returned to me later, those muggy summer nights of nursing my daughter, my sweat dripping onto her closed eyelids, the beech tree outside the window a parched shadow in the moonlight: when trees are thirsty, they scream.

      “No, we can’t hear it,” the scientist-author said. “But just because it’s ultrasonic, that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”

      Three questions into the Q&A, a woman stood and read from a notebook decorated with cats wearing aprons.

      “Would you say,” she began, “that a tree can still communicate once it’s wood?”          “You mean once it’s been made into lumber?” the scientist-author said.

      “And even after. When it has been made into something new—a table for example.”

      “Once it is dead, wood cannot feel or speak or smell. Only a live tree can communicate in these ways.”

      Dissatisfied, the woman pressed on, and in the next fifteen minutes, the whole room endured the story of the felled maple in her backyard—how it was destined to become a table. Her grandchildren, who would not swing from the branches, would gather around and eat pierogies off of it instead. Her husband did not think the project worth the money and wanted the tree hauled away. They had a perfectly good Arborite table with a leaf and everything.

      The scientist was gentle, but insistent. “I’m sorry. Tables aren’t trees. I only study trees.”

      We were all thinking it: Would someone please take the microphone away from her? But I think I understand now, this need to be endorsed by a greater authority.

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      My mom is at Dollarama picking up those mini clothespins because that’s what people do, she said, for pictures: hang them up on little hemp clotheslines with little pins. And I am still standing in front of the same five outfits laid out on the bed. I have narrowed the decision down to three. When my husband takes the phone away from me, I am dialing the number of the hairdresser, the one all the other mothers recommended, because for a little extra, she could felt the baby’s first locks of hair into a first Christmas ornament, a soft brown acorn for the tree. I want to ask, based on Annie’s last haircut, which was also her first, if Annie would look more alive in the red dress with the robin on the front or the white dress with the ruffled lace sleeves. I could send the hairdresser pictures if that would help. Annie said her first word—cow—in the red dress, but she was baptized into the family of God in the white dress. Then again, I’m sure I could take out the waist in the jogging suit she was so conveniently wearing for her first steps. What do you think about that? I want to ask the hairdresser.

      I have already debated these factors with my mother, my husband’s mother, his sister, and our pastor, and I am leaning toward the red dress with the robin, but I want the hairdresser’s professional opinion. The dress I choose will be the last outfit Annie ever wears, and I am not even allowed to dress her in it. They tell me that has to be done by a professional too.

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      The scientist could have easily lied. “Yes, tables can communicate. Bookshelves too, and even picture frames.” That’s all he would have needed to say to get the whole event back on track. But it was an activist in a Save the Amazon t-shirt who finally shut the woman up when he turned in his seat and said, “Lady, your tree is dead. Let it rest.”

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      These days, when I can’t sleep, I look up facts about arborio rice. In the 1940s through 60s, only women worked in the harsh conditions of Italy’s rice belt. The Rice-Weeders were known for counter-fascist activism, and for the inability to carry babies to term. To protest exploitation, they sang polyphonic songs across the rice paddies, like birds.

      To grow, rice must be submerged, and flooded fields produce, in one season, the same amount of carbon as twelve hundred coal power plants. Reading power plants, I think, no, they aren’t plants at all.

      The water for flooding the paddies exists first as ice in the Alps. When it melts and flows down, it must be held until the proper time at the edge of the Pianura Pandana, the rice plain, behind embankments. In this waiting water, this past year, two children, playing, drowned.

      Wouldn’t it be better if rice did grow on trees? Imagine the grains sprouting from branch tips already hulled and milled. A thousand rattles when the wind blows through, a crunch of summer snow on the ground. And the visit from a sparrow singing: Mom! Mom! Mom! Help me find my mitten-itten-itten-itten.

      But we’re in a different country now, so that call won’t translate. At the very least, they’ll have to replace the words mitten and mom.