While watching the hauntingly beautiful new film Train Dreams , I found myself thinking of the four hemlock pines that stood side-by-side in the grassy yard beside the house where I grew up. Their trunks were as tall and straight as ship masts. Who knows how old they were, but I’m guessing they were planted when the house was built in the 1920s. By the time I was a boy, their tops towered high above the roof.

We played endlessly beneath the cover of these pines, twirling madly on a single rope swing attached to one especially formidable branch. The ground there is probably still embedded with toys lost in the mud once upon a time. I remember the grown-ups saying that if a tornado ever struck the neighborhood, these trees would guard our home as an immovable windbreak. That kind of eme

See Full Page