I live in the mountains in a house surrounded by trees. In the woods, in other words.

I like it here, and in particular, I like all those trees. As much as anything else, they’re the reason I live in the country. They’re beautiful, and they supply me with oxygen, shade, and serenity.

If that makes it sound like the trees and I are solid partners, or even friends, I’m afraid it hasn’t played out that way. My side of the relationship consists mostly of cutting them down. By my reckoning, I have felled roughly 70 of my leafy comrades since moving here 50 years ago. And that’s not even counting the saplings (baby trees, if you like).

Even as I write this, five more are coming down on the upper hillside. It’s not a total massacre, really. Three were already dead thanks to the big fire in 2020, and the other two were weakened by it. But it’s not a mercy killing, either. If one of those two still-living trees were to fall, they might wreck some of my stuff. Can’t have that.

The truth of it is that, in spite of my professed love for them and my appreciation for their crucial role in maintaining a healthy planet, I treat trees pretty badly. I cut them down, I burn their corpses for heat, I traffic in the sale of their bodies and use them to build my home and outbuildings. They’ve done me some bad turns too, I guess, but as far as I can tell none of that was on purpose.

I’m not sure what to do with my guilt over this unhealthy relationship. I do give money to the Sierra Club and other environmental causes. I plant trees, and I nurture them. I try as hard as I can not to hurt trees if I don’t have to. But none of that will erase the history of carnage committed solely for my own convenience.

Maybe I could do a little light pruning, though. I hear they like that.

A color photograph
Pinkish and pale with age
Escapes at last
From its hiding place
Among these old papers
Bound for oblivion

Ruddy faces
Eager, uncertain
Full of youth
Gazing out from a faraway world
Where we once lived
Together

Now eye contact
Across the years
Returning for a moment
Together
In that fading memory
Now nearly gone

But not just yet
Here, a new hideaway
Where it might be found again
And hold off oblivion
A little longer
For that distant time and place

A color photograph
Pinkish and pale with age
Escapes at last
From its hiding place
Among these old papers
Bound for oblivion

Ruddy faces
Eager, uncertain
Full of youth
Gazing out from a faraway world
Where we once lived
Together

Now eye contact
Across the years
Returning for a moment
Together
In that fading memory
Now nearly gone

But not just yet
Here, a new hideaway
Where it might be found again
And hold off oblivion
A little longer
For that distant time and place

I don’t know how much thought you give to the Earth’s molten core, but of late it’s been front and center in my mind. Even if you weren’t about to ask me why, I feel compelled to tell you.

For starters, I recently learned that our planet’s iron-and-nickel centre, according to a team of crack geophysicists, actually spins independently of the rest of the globe (the crust and the mantle, taken jointly). I’ve also learned, to my slight alarm, that the core spins at higher rpm’s than the non-molten ball that contains it.

That just seems a bit odd, is all. Imagine tossing a jelly donut up in the air. If the donut is twirling, you’d expect the filling to twirl at the same speed as the rest of it. Not so, apparently, with our giant, filled pastry of a planet. Its red-hot fruit coagulation normally twirls faster than its soft, buttery dough. If anything, you would imagine that it would lag behind the speed of the exterior. But no.

Unfortunately, the jelly donut metaphor is complicated by the fact that the molten core itself has a core of its own. The outer part is liquid and the inner sphere is solid. It’s the solid part that’s got its own particular spin. To preserve our metaphor, I’m going to say this inner sphere is a whole (pitted) cherry.

Okay, that is still pretty odd, but I suppose there’s no reason to panic. I didn’t panic when I first learned that the surface of the Earth is moving at a thousand miles an hour, either. Our planet has spun along for eons without anybody jumping up in the air…and landing in the next county. So I guess it’s not a problem.

Similarly, our ball-within-a-ball-within-a-ball has been rotating in there for millions of years, and nothing has gone wrong. Recently, however, the cherry inside the big blob of hot jelly may have begun to spin more slowly. Still faster than the dough, they say, but it’s decelerating for some reason. It’s a bit unsettling that there is another spinning ball inside the Earth — about 3100 miles underneath our feet — that operates on a schedule all its own.

But I could live with that, too. Stuff is always slowing down and speeding up in nature. There is, however, another possibility that our team of researchers has suggested: maybe, just maybe, the cherry in our jelly blob may have begun to rotate in the opposite direction!

I’m sorry, but that is too much. I simply cannot live with the possibility of two planet-sized balls, one inside the other, spinning in different directions. And did I mention that the little one is hotter than the surface of the sun? To me, that is a cataclysm waiting to happen. But it turns out I needn’t worry. Science itself has come to my rescue…in the form of another team of crack geophysicists. This group says that it’s way too hard to tell what is happening inside Earth with the limited amount of seismic data we have. They point out that "none of the existing models really explains all the available data well.”

I’m with those guys. I say our molten core is not spinning separately, after all — in any direction. I do not take this position because it is obviously correct. I have no idea, really. I’m just looking for anything that confirms a stable universe where I can enjoy my donut in peace.