Interview with Natalie Oakgrove and Connie Pinerow

F. S.

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen, Flora and Fauna of our beautiful forest! I’ve heard rumors that some woodpeckers of both the red-headed and the red-bellied kind were thinking about relocating to the forest plantation up north of us. Well, this interview is for you, and I hope you listen carefully before making a bird-brained mistake!

I visited with Connie Pinerow over at the plantation earlier this month, and today, I have Natalie Oakgrove here to help me compare plantation life with life in our forest.

Dear Natalie, thank you for speaking to me today. It’s been such a pleasure living in your neighborhood for so long! I appreciate your sturdy branches as I move around, filling my storage for the winter every year.

N.O.

It’s a pleasure to be here. I often wondered myself what life was like on the plantation, so it is only natural for me to be here. Of course, I am fairly young still, I don’t have the wisdom of the giants among us.

F. S.

You’re bringing up an important point already — while visiting the plantation, I was looking for the wise giants of that forest. Believe it or not, there were no giant trees!

Connie Pinerow was kind enough to speak to me there and she said that, in her estimation, they were all forty-six summers old, and none of the trees were more than a few weeks apart in age.

N.O.

Oh, my! I can’t imagine not living near Mother Tree! I remember with fondness the day my tiny roots were tickled and the fungi of the forest floor started to connect me to the community of trees around me! As a young seedling, this developing connection was the most fascinating feeling! And I love it in the spring when the little ones join us.

F. S.

As a matter of fact, I asked Connie about her seedling days. Every so often, she would be transplanted to a new home. Always in rows, the same size containers for everyone, the same distance away from each other. Her every need was met, just the right amount of nutrients, water, and of course plenty of sunlight for quick growth. I asked her about other species of pines, or even oaks and beeches and birches, but she has only heard about those other trees later, after she was transplanted out. She still hasn’t met anyone not belonging to the same species as her.

N.O.

How interesting! And after her final transplant, was she able to connect with her container-mates then?

F. S.

Yes, of course! But their connection has always been poor, nothing like the network of different species we experience here. She said they were always competing — for sunlight above ground, for food below ground. She always loved reaching for the sky. The trees there, they are all straight and tall, because they rapidly absorb as much life as they can.

N.O.

I wanted to race and reach high, too! Every spring, I would grow taller, my leaves ready to soak in everything around me. But Mother Tree, she grew out her leaves, and my growth would slow down. I wanted to hurry and grow as tall as Great-great-grandma over there, but instead, Mother Tree kept me in her shadow. She talked to me then — she shared stories. She talked about the birds that came to nest in her crown. About the deer that wandered among us. And about big storms of earlier times! I was so glad she was standing beside me, to protect me from the winds of early summer, the snow in the winter, and all that rain! She told me to grow my roots both deep and wide.

F. S.

Connie talked about storms, too. In her life, they are the most terrifying things. She said her biggest fear is the spring rain, coming down so fast and taking the thin soil at her foot, she has nothing to hold on to. Plantation trees, she said, are tall and straight, perfect for their job in life, but they aren’t especially flexible or resilient.

N. O.

Sounds terrible! I couldn’t stand a life such as hers! In fact, I would purposely grow big, strong side-branches like the ones you like to jump around on! Don’t they have rebellious trees who refuse to partake in the race to the top? Ones who don’t stand dutifully in line, but do something unexpected instead?

F. S.

That would be Edgar and his friends. Connie says they live at the edge of the plantation and hang out with the brambles beneath and share stories with all kinds of birds and butterflies. They are not very popular among the hardworking trees like Connie. But she also mentioned that she has never seen a butterfly, she is not even sure she’d recognize one if she saw one. Of course, her attention is always on the sky above, so I don’t know how she’d even notice them!

N. O.

What a different life altogether! I wonder if she knows what she’s missing out on!

About this story

When I think of kids in our public schools, with their desks in perfect rows, their lives focusing on more, and sooner, and faster, I am reminded of Connie on the plantation. Of course, every analogy has its limits, and there are all kinds of schools out there, but I think it’s worth considering what our kids are missing out on when we hustle them into and through our current educational systems.

Before marriage and kids, I started research on how the adult bilingual brain processes subordinate clauses, such as, “Mary Poppins assessed the personality of Jane and Michael with the measuring stick she pulled from her magic bag.” After the kids were born, my attention turned to the developing brain and parent-child communication.

I am a cognitive psychologist, a child psychology consultant, a family support specialist, and I write stories like this to put parenting situations in a different perspective, to make them easier to understand and more memorable, and to help with the discussion of related subjects. I manage Flywheel Parenting on Facebook and Slack.