He understands my deepest fear, too, when he describes imagining meeting his friend's Mom. "How would her mom see me? She wouldn't. She'd see someone boring and plain, skinny and flat. Her forehead probably wouldn't frown, but her eyes--I bet they're the same ice blue as Kit's--would glaze over to something, anything, more interesting" (100).
"I stopped in place. 'Communicate? Trees?'
Derek laughed again. 'I know. It sounds crazy, doesn't it? Communicate in the sense that trees seem able and willing to figure out how to support one another. We've learned that trees will, in essence, feed stumps after their trunks are chopped or fall down. Without their branches or leaves, these stumps have no business growing--yet neighboring trees will leech their own resources and food to these stumps. I've got to think it's because the damaged tree is hurting and the others somehow sense it. One in the Northwest even began to grow bark thirty years after it was chopped down. How could it be anything but friendship?'" (125).
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