Do rocks like becoming stone walls?
If you listen carefully enough, trees speak (or sometimes whisper) or even just stand there looking at plenty of human folly around them, according to Linda Tatelbaum. As a back-to-the-land homesteader, and later a professor at Colby, she and her husband planted themselves in midcoast Maine in the late 1970s, building a house, living off the grid, and fighting a battle with critters that saw their garden as a snack bar. Woman Who Speaks Tree follows her memoir, Carrying Water, and firmly places trees as the observers of and strength-givers for her life’s major events-building a house, having a child, the aging and death of her parents, and her role in academia. In the 1970s, Tatelbaum and her husband show up at writer-farmer Wendell Berry’s door in Kentucky (whom they don’t know from Adam) saying, “‘We read in the Mother Earth News that West Virginia and Kentucky are good for what we want to do. Small farm, small house, you know,'” they stammer. Berry replies, “‘Go back and settle wher
