Isolation

There’s a lone aspen tree outside my kitchen window. Some of you will understand that there is something wrong with that sentence.

The aspen wasn’t always alone. When I first moved in, there were perhaps five or six huddled together on the bank of the pond. They turned a brilliant gold in fall, leaves dancing like jazz hands.

Aspen grow in groves. They share a common root system and have identical genetic markers, making each tree a clone of every other tree in its grove. Pando, a giant aspen grove in Utah, is widely considered to be the largest single organism on earth. How does one aspen tree stand by itself?

My apartment managers thinned the trees around the complex a couple of years ago. Fire mitigation, probably. We had particularly bad fire seasons in Colorado in 2017 and 2018. It’s a solid strategy. But they took all the aspen trees outside my kitchen, save one.

The first year after its grove disappeared, the aspen only leafed partway. Several branches stayed barren, and the leaves that appeared were scrawny and unhealthy. Last year, it didn’t leaf at all. This year, it sways when the winds hit. The aspen wasn’t meant to survive on its own.

Yesterday, I spent an hour in the sun with a friend. We sat far apart and watched bees pollinate the dandelions. It was my first unmediated contact with a human in almost two months. All my interactions have been through a cracked window or a closed door or a screen or, best case, from my balcony down to the sidewalk below.

I don’t want to be dramatic about it, but I don’t know what else to compare it to: you can feel when your leaves start dying back. Your roots become disconnected from a common system and you begin to wither. After just an hour of conversation, I feel more rooted, in every sense of the word.