He was a man who celebrated coldness. I was friends with his children but they were dire children. The further they got from their house, the better they were. We needed a place to be animals. We lived in imagined worlds and this often took place in the wilderness. We could make up our own laws or imagine no laws but the ones the trees had decided work for them. Trees create a forest but it’s a strange form of society. We hammered on the bodies of trees with branches that may have been their own arms. But it was okay. The trees could take it. They were ridiculously tall and older than anyone alive in our families. Maybe the branches we used to beat them were the arms of their beloved. While they stood a number of feet apart, the roots down in the wet dark might be in a lovelock. They might have clasped that way for more than a century. Those trees have as many arms as some Indian gods and goddesses. Now I am old but probably they are not. They’re still there. Once, I drove back to that state and felt the need to visit even them. But I stayed in the car this time. I saw only the edge of the forest. I knew they were still conversing under the earth, still reaching out in tendrils and knowing each other. The world above might be destroying them, but they had a business of knowing and connecting that simply must happen in the earth.