This website is called FISH.CLIMB.BRANCH... This entry is the third of four brief narrative essays to explain why in the hell that is.

Above the kitchen sink in our home sits a large window that faces southward. The window overlooks a multi-tiered garden with rock-ringed beds of basil, kale, peas, cucumbers, raspberries, strawberries, grapes, and perennial flowers. There grow also - because I have not (yet!) pulled them - weeds galore. Just past the garden beds, a line of stones marks the back of our property, a remnant New England stone wall from 19th century settlement. Beyond the wall, a handsome patch of Northern hardwood forest rises tall, predominated by maples, but also beech, ash, birch and the occasional hophornbeam and coniferous Eastern white pine. As I make breakfast each morning, these trees at the forest edge provide my first daily hint of nature's progressions.

I recently consulted some literature on trees and discovered that they grow from their outermost reaches - their branch tips. From those tips, new twigs offshoot and extend. Beneath the soil, roots similarly expand from the tips. As I learned studying the rings of a felled tree as a child, even a tree's trunk grows thicker from the outside, expanding incrementally just beneath the bark year after year, the memory of that growth stamped within.

In my life, nature has reminded and helped me to pay attention. This sensibility and skillset of simple awareness, although it comes quite naturally to me in the woods, is something I find elusive at times in other, more indoor classrooms.

When I observe the grove out behind our home, I think about the death and rebirth of the whole lot. I consider how our home being situated in a Vermont valley means it was likely clearcut for sheep grazing midway through the 19th century, and probably farmed thereafter. I imagine how the seeds of the cleared trees remained on the ground in various samaras, nuts, pods and cones... how some of those seeds must have germinated and grew in the light of the open field only to be felled just as they were starting to sprout. I think of how, one day, maybe a century ago, the harvest stopped and the trees at the forest's edge dropped seeds. I think of those seeds, finally free to sprout into saplings and grow tall, progressing across the field over the years and eventually shading the whole plot under a forested canopy once again.

The most visceral memories of my childhood involve gardens and trees. Wandering around the garden alongside my sister, hunting for raspberries and gobbling every morsel I could find. Going out to the asparagus patch with knife and colander to bring in some of the green shoots for my dad to cook for dinner. Running through trees in the muddy backwoods to play with the neighborhood boys at their houses.

Moving away as a girl of 12, coming back a few seasons later to visit the same neighborhood boys, and having one invite me into a room, put a blanket over us, and reach down my pants and grope me. Laying there as minutes ticked by, afraid and frozen. This last memory was one I tucked away for the better part of two decades until my country elected a man to power who does such things too, causing the memory to come roaring back like a flash flood.

On a hot day in early adulthood, I went swimming in a Vermont creek with two sisters whom I call friends. We small-talked and giggled our way down the shady pine-needled path to the clear swimming hole below. We cannonballed into the river off of boulders and passed the time feeling fine, treading water. Upstream and above us, the creek ran over rocks, cascading into a peaceful waterfall that we swam by and bathed in.

Then the mood of the younger of the two sisters changed. She became agitated and wanted to leave, and called the remaining two of us out of the creek. As we walked back up the sidehill, we began to hear repetitive, thunderous claps that crescendoed randomly and unfamiliarly. The three of us stopped and turned back toward the noise. In a flash, a wall of water fifteen feet high shot over the waterfall above where we had just enjoyed a lazy swim. Tree trunks rode the rushing wave downstream, whirling and smashing against the rock embankments of the river. We learned later that a beaver dam had broken a mile upstream, causing a flash flood.

Nature astonishes me. My own. Others'. All of it. For richer and for poorer, physically and spiritually speaking.

It was not my historical habit to meditate on pain. But, in facing my pain, and sifting through it, holding it up as an object of curiosity, a web spun and inextricably linked, and allowing it to wash over me, I have grown. I have felt more afraid and vulnerable, and yet freer, than I'd previously imagined possible.

As with the tips of tree branches, my growth has happened at my outer limits. Through my lifetime of outings deep in the forest, I've seen how death and life feed one another, how pain and joy are intertwined. It takes one to know the other. On stormy days, standing at my kitchen window -- inside, warm and at home (and yet less at home) -- I sometimes look out and watch our treetops sway, even shimmy, in the gale. I am reminded that what bends doesn't break. Or, rather, that what is always reaching from its tips to grow to great heights may splinter and snap in certain parts in certain conditions, but in its essence will remain intact and able to grow anew until its inevitable end. To live is to be exposed. To branch out is to live.