I used to be so afraid of this place.

The ghostly trunks of the Japanese Birch, shimmering in the sun like holograms trying to deceive me. These angels of death standing straight up from the earth, their too-pale bodies scarred sporadically with dark, jagged rings.

Their skeletal limbs, far above in the sky, harbouring serrated leaves that drop in silence and utter no sound under foot. The softness of the lush canopy lost out of sight atop a cloud of eery silence.

Their bark and branches too light to be real, as if the ground had sapped all their life and strength away, leaving this bleached and desolate army standing naked and apart.

And in the autumn when their heads would turn to fire, like matches lit aflame; the terrifying juxtaposition of their pasty trunks against the blaze of crumbling leaves. Their crunching under winter boots was crisp and clear and creepy, but worse that it left the trunks exposed; stripped, spindly corpses.

But what I would give for that spectral forest to return, and replace the decimation that it’s deforestation left instead...