April 13, 2026

I walked out the front door and saw the tree. I thought I saw the future.

It’s not exactly a tree, really just a three-foot-long stalk anchored in a 12-inch plastic planter. It sat where I had left it near the garage nearly five months ago, in late November. Through the bleak winter I walked past it without seeing it. Now a dozen green leaves fluttered along its full length. It was alive.

A week before Thanksgiving I registered for the “Turkey Trot” run around downtown streets. The race was sponsored by a non-profit, TreesUpstate, that encourages tree planting and cultivation and green-space development. It donated free trees to the runners. I took one and tossed it in the van.

Trees, along with front lawns, are part of the suburban mystique. Families who venture from crowded cities seeking space, safety, and good schools in commuter subdivisions hope also for the traditional tree-lined street. They hope for gentle shade in spring and summer, for the cheerful, vibrant colors of fall.

Climate dictates. In the desert Southwest local drought-resistant species, cacti and other things, may be all homeowners expect. But in most of the country the suburban vision is shade-abundant oaks, maples, sycamores, and others, creating a sense of lush, verdant comfort and beauty.

Trees weren’t always important. The history of America’s migration to the suburbs dates from the end of World War II and the wildfire spread of so-called Levittowns, started by New York builder Levitt & Sons. Their homes were built to cookie-cutter designs, Cape Cods or modest ranches, stamped out inside of a week.

In those years builders bulldozed forests and fields to make room for construction. Many if not most of the Levittown-type neighborhoods went up in sterile treeless spaces. The developers sold mostly to young couples, who used the husband’s veterans benefits to afford the home.  

My parents were among them. When I was three or four they made the life-changing decision to move to Ridgewood, N.J., from a small New York City apartment. The neighborhood I grew up in fit the pattern, boxy Cape Cods, postage-stamp yards. The selling price was around $10,000. This was 1953.

The subdivision was, and I think still is, called “Ridgewood Lawns.” I recall, my memory helped along by old photos, the front yards were dirt. It was up to the new owner to plant grass. The developer put in thin maple saplings along the sidewalk. Seven decades later those saplings are fully grown monsters, providing the classic tree-shaded look for the enjoyment of the current residents, who likely were not born in 1953.  

Our Nashville and Virginia yards had big trees. While we lived in those places we thought of the landscaping as the abiding, unchanging background to our personal space. But over the years we recognized that time has no anchor. Before we were born those trees didn’t exist. Now the giant trees that shaded the front lawn and backyard of our Nashville house are long gone. Trees grow, they die, people cut them down.

Our lot here is bordered on one side by a large hedgerow, but no trees shade our small square front yard. The across-the-street neighbor has a small tree. Up and down the block you see one or two, a yard a few doors away has several. The look is largely bare. In the summer the sun beats down, I wait until evening to cut the grass.

Occasionally we would talk about having a nice shade tree in the yard. It was one of those ideas that would pop up then be crowded out by something else. Now I looked at my three-foot-high stalk. The new leaves were a bright, healthy green. We could do this.

We called the local utility service that will mark underground utility lines. In Virginia years ago I had tried to excavate for something and cut the buried Verizon line with my shovel. We did without the service until the company sent a guy to repair it a week later. A charge was added to our bill.

Within days, technicians from AT&T, Spectrum, and Duke Power showed up and spraypainted red, orange, and yellow streaks across the lawn to mark their lines, some curving from front to back. The discovery was unnerving, a lot of power runs under our patch. Still, it seemed there would be room for the tree.

Then it rained, one day, two, three. The painted lines washed away. I peered at the lawn, trying to reconstruct them from memory. I called again. Again the techs showed up and painted the lawn. I found a spot I thought was safely away from the lines and dug nervously into the concrete-like Carolina clay.

My back ached as I shoveled. Six inches, eight inches, ten inches. I breathed deeply. A white pickup marked Greer CPW pulled up at the curb. A fellow in a hardhat and yellow vest got out. I leaned on my shovel. The back of his shirt had a label: “Detection Validation.”

“Hi, I’m with Public Works,” he said. “I’m here to check the line marking. We want to be sure it’s been done right.” He fetched his detection device and spray gun from the truck and stared at the ground. He followed the painted lines up and down the yard, his device beeping. He walked close to my hole.

“Whoa, this guy’s a little off,” he said. He was three feet away from my digging. He painted a new line. “This is fiber optic,” he said. He looked at the hole. “You’re okay,” he said. “Glad you called us. Have a good day!” He stowed his gear and drove off. I stuck the tree in the hole, filled it in, watered, and added some mulch. I wondered about the roots reaching the fiber optic.

The next day, anyway, the leaves were still green. We imagine it towering, full, and luxuriant. That will not be for us. It may not survive. But maybe it will. Ten or twenty years from now a future owner, perhaps a young family, will enjoy it.

April 6, 2026

The priest knelt and washed the feet of twelve men seated at the altar, a rite performed at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper at thousands of churches on Thursday of Holy Week. When the Mass ended he left the church in silence. Acolytes removed the altar cloths. Some people filed out, others remained on their knees. The Triduum began.

Last week news reached home about U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles hitting civilian homes and schools. Two generations of senior Iranian officials, murderous barbarians while alive, now are dead, although someone apparently is in charge over there, still launching missiles and drones. U.S. forces shipped in ammo from South Korea.

U.S. government tough-guy talk risked garbling the Easter message. A couple of thousand civilians are dead in Iran and Lebanon. Trump’s bizarre statements about the war and indifference to the human cost insult the foundation of religious faith, even while church pews were packed and the Pope repeated his call for peace.

All faiths, Christian and non-Christian, acknowledge human history as a path inclined between suffering and redemption, a war between good and evil, heaven and hell. We know this from the primary sources, the Old and New Testaments, the Torah, the Qur’an, the Vedas and Bagavad Gita, the dukkhas of Buddhism.

Now at Easter, Christians confront the scandal of the Resurrection, or to the skeptics, “resurrection.” The scandal is unbelief, if the scope of gratuitous suffering unleashed by the Trump war gives new energy to cynics.

Christ’s rising from the dead on Easter morning, reported in all the Gospels, in Paul’s epistles, and in Acts of the Apostles, is the bedrock of Christianity. But the Gospels emerged from a spoken tradition passed down over many years in many languages. Academics who study Scripture believe Mark was actually written around 70 A.D., Matthew and Luke in the 80s, and John around 90 or 95. All decades after Christ.

Stories change over time. Bart Ehrman, distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, once a committed “fundamentalist” Christian who accepted the inerrancy of the Bible, makes the point that Jesus’ followers who claimed he rose from the dead may well have believed that he rose from the dead. After all he was supposed to be the Messiah.

Erhman, talking to The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, says that in the time of Christ the Jews believed the Messiah would be a revolutionary leader who would create a new kingdom on earth. Getting arrested, humiliated, beaten, and dying on the cross proved that Jesus was not that leader. They said he would rise from the dead and, Erhman says, kept saying it.

The professor has an example: he once was giving a lecture when he saw his father in the third row. His father had died 15 years earlier. He thought he saw his father. In the same way, he says, Christ’s followers who claimed to see him for 40 days after the Resurrection actually had a vision or a dream that they saw him. After all, people simply do not rise from the dead. In the same way, a man does not walk on water or perform the other miracles Jesus is said to perform.

But the Resurrection accounts, Douthat adds, don’t say anything like, “Now we proclaim Christ risen.” So there is always doubt, doubt that the Resurrection happened, that a man walked on water or gave sight to the blind. Doubt, always.

But not a case of mistaken identity. History shows us that the Resurrection in following years created a creed based on Christ’s message to “love your neighbor” that spread from Jerusalem to Judea, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, North Africa, Rome, Spain. Eventually it altered history.

Erhman says he’s an “odd duck. I’m an agnostic, I’m an atheist, a Christian atheist and I’m a New Testament scholar, which is weird.”

He is an odd duck. He cites the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 25-37). A lawyer asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers, “A man … is attacked by bandits and left seriously wounded. A priest walks past him, then a Levite, neither help the man. Then a Samaritan traveling by was moved to pity at the sight. He binds the man’s wounds and takes him to an inn to be cared for.”

Jesus asks, “Who was the man’s neighbor?” The lawyer answers, “The one who treated him with compassion.” Jesus says, “Go and do the same.”

Erhman adds, “This was Jesus’ teaching, and I subscribe to that idea. What bothers me is that so many Christians … don’t follow his most basic teaching.” Later he adds, “I don’t believe in God. I absolutely don’t believe in God or any supernatural powers. But I do think the teachings of Jesus are something I want to replicate in my life as much as I can.”

Through Holy Week we worked at chores, yard work, other things. When the van wouldn’t start at the state park, a young ranger showed up with jumper cables. She explained she had never jumpstarted a car. She guessed at attaching the cables and tried three times, no luck. I was set to call a tow truck when she said, “Let’s try one more time.” It started.

That day a veteran trail hiker here in town received a cancer diagnosis.

We paid attention to the querulous hunt through ancient texts for nits in this parable or that one. Then we witnessed the poetic power of the Easter message, the beginning of faith. We heard again the story of the empty tomb, which in time transformed the world.