“Going, coming back, turning around”: Arrival(s) at the Trees as Attunement to Ecological Change

There is the long swoosh of the Skytrain moving like an exhalation of a mechanical puff of air behind me as I turn around the corner onto the greenway. It is a tree-lined path shared by pedestrians and bikes that parallels the train tracks and creates a sound cushion between them and the surrounding houses. I have long not lived in this neighborhood,1 untethered from it now even in the most remote narrative sense for more than ten years, and yet I have come to see the trees more than a hundred times, participating in a kind of perceptual snail cinema, tuning my attention to their minute but unrelenting change. No matter how still the air, if one looks up at the latticework of their branches, the scrappy pattern of green-black against the muted gray of the Pacific Northwest sky, the intervals or windows through which such sky is cut are changing.