So some Science Men did some Math and determined that there are at present 3.04 trillion trees on the planet.

That might seem like a lot, but I guess it's really not. Because the same Counting Men estimate that there were an additional 3 trillion or so trees here before the people showed up.

Michael Pollan has written intelligently about how grasslands and forests have for eons bickered with one another; humans, when they devolved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, commenced aggressively to weigh in on the side of the grasslands.

They're a little out of control, the humans, with the tree-felling. Because the Math says about 15 billion trees go down every year, with only 5 billion annually growing to replace them.

According to the Study, 42.8% of the world's trees are in tropical and subtropical forests, while another 24.2% are in the boreal and tundra zones of Canada, Russia, and China. Most of the rest are scattered around my yard.

This is not a large piece of property—well under an acre—but present are a fair number of trees. In the front is a pine and a fir, both bigger than God. In the back are a couple large oaks, and some more firs. There are also, here and there, walnuts, plums, pears, and several truly terrifying specimens that heinously produce those body-swallowing flowering pods featured in the 1978 documentary film Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

The spring after I moved in here, one of these alien trees cunningly stretched a branch right over the front porch, offering to me several strange and unusual flowers, obviously hoping that I would pick them and take them into the house.

But I am not so easily fooled. For I had seen the documentary, and so know that the aliens, once on earth, arrange themselves into cunning little flowers, which humans will pick and take home. Then, while the humans sleep, the plants transform themselves into large human-sized pods, and then into the humans themselves. They then suck the life-force out of the humans, "becoming" the humans, and the original humans crumble into dust, and are swept up by their pod replacements and placed in the garbage.

That so many of the humans in the San Francisco area of the planet around that time became so selfish, self-absorbed, and narcissistic, is explained by the fact that they had become pods. The term for that time was "The Me Generation." But it really should have been "The Pod Generation."

Whether, and/or how far, poddom spread from the Bay Area and into the rest of the world, this has never been definitively determined. I believe that these alleged "flowers," here in these trees, mark an eastward push for the pod people. And I want nothing to do with them.

I mean, why, out of all the many branches, on all the many trees, did the pod flowers just happen to appear first on the branch most accessible to me? Because they are pods. And they were hoping I was ignorant of the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers revelation, and would therefore delightedly, dumbly, pick one, bring it into the house, and there unwittingly succumb to poddom.

No.

That I saw through them, this has pissed them off. For every year, hundreds of these pod flowers appear in these trees.

I outwit them by simply refusing to sleep, until the flowers dry up and fall off.

So far it's working.

At the dawn of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers documentary, a pod teacher is leading a group of still-human children through a park, there encouraging them to pick pod-flowers, to take home to their parents, so that children and parents both may join the ranks of the pods. Coldly observing this Outrage, from a swing, is Robert Duvall, a pod priest.

We know that Robert Duvall became a pod, because, although once Boo Radley and Augustus McRae, he now spends his days down in Argentina, there crudely bellowing about the benefits of "macho," and grousing that Francis Ford Coppola cut from Apocalypse Now scenes that would have shown that his character in that film, the nutbomb Colonel Kilgore, was actually "good."

There is a Scout-swing hanging from fir tree at the front of the house. If I go out on the porch some morning, and see Robert Duvall sitting in that swing, I will know that all is over.

One of the trees that was here when I moved in was a dead tree.

When I arrived, it took a while to determine which trees were with me, and which were not. For non-evergreen trees, when dormant, can look pretty poorly. Sickly sticks, with feet. Are you alive, I would ask them? Or the Other?

Many of them would not answer for some time. Pretty pokey, in putting their leaves out. Finally, though, round about earliest summer, it became clear that everybody was living—except for this one old grizzled dude at the front of the property. I kept hoping he would send out just a leaf or two. But: no such luck.

Finally, I had to face it: that tree had gone over.

Why?

Who knows? These things happen.

In keeping with the national pastime, I blame Obama.

Dead things, standing, eventually they fall. And so it was with this person. During one winter's Job storm, I noticed, through the wind and the rain, that this tree had been uprooted, and was leaning into the big fir. The fir didn't care: it is big, and alive, and the dead guy was comparatively small, and didn't weigh much of anything, being dead and all.

I knew the Normal thing to do was to get some Man out here with a Loud Saw to wrest it to the ground and cut it into rounds.

Then I thought: why?

Over there in Italy, they have a Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is a tourist attraction. Humans come to look at it, and even spend there Money. Why, I thought, shouldn't they also come to gaze upon the Leaning Tree Of Here? Maybe they would even give me Money. If they gave me enough, I could retire. Or at least afford to feed all these welfare-recipient "wild" animals who have somehow decided I am the filler of their feedbag.

Also, the Leaning Tree of Here, since it loomed over the walk I traverse to enter and exit the house, encouraged Alertness. I mean, the thing was going to further fall, someday. And it would be best, for me, if it didn't do that while I was under it. So, when I walked under it, I was Aware. Just in case. This is called Living In Present Time. Which is supposed to be good for you.

But then one of the property-manager ladies happened to drive by, and The Leaning Tree Of Here nearly caused her to shriek and poke her eyes out. And so, a Man with a Loud Saw was quickly summoned. I watched. It is depressing, really, how little time it takes to fell and cut into rounds a tree. Especially compared to how long it takes that tree to grow. The smaller rounds I brought into the house and burned in the stove. The larger ones I left round the stump, so they can decompose, and meanwhile, in the cracks and crevices between, provide shelter for various creatures, including some gnomes.

The man who owns the lube-shop down the road wants all the trees on the property to be dead. Because he wants to buy the property and then raze the house and uproot all the trees and put in some sort of septic-service business.

It is my opinion he should be sent to The Hague for even contemplating such a notion. When he blithely informed me of this plan, at first I thought I would try to get the place registered as historic, thereby Protecting it, since this house was originally the house of the first white-people doctor in this town. And the two little houses off to the side and the back were where he saw his patients. But then the property-manager ladies assured me that the the doctor's family, which still owns the place, would never sell. I went to Zillow, and there found out why. I toted up the rent that I and my two neighbors pay, and set it against the assessed value of the house, and realized the owners are sitting on a Midas pile. As long as we tenants do not erect meth labs or establish pit-bull farms, they, the owners, are in the money.

I think the two pear trees here were probably planted by that original doctor. They are very old, and haven't been pruned in decades. The one in the back, at the terminus of the lilac forest, is so tall that it is not possible for a human to access the fruit unless he is Tarzan, or requests the fire department to send out one of those ladder trucks. But that's fine. The squirrels enjoy the pears. There is, about halfway up that tree, a marvelous natural seat: a squirrel will pick a pear, then scrabble down to the seat, scrunch his butt into it, dangle his back feet over the sides, then rest the pear on his chest and with his little front feet rotate it around for a good gnaw. That's a contented creature. When he's done, the pear goes over the side, to the ground, where it is later finished first by the deer, and then by insects.

The fruit in the second tree I can pick without risking a hospital visit. The pears there, however, are sometimes at risk from the jays. The scrub jays perch in that tree to monitor the bird-feed situation on the kitchen-porch railing. Sometimes, if the supply of peanuts there runs low—or, worse yet, disappears entirely—a jay, in Frustration and Outrage, will savagely drive his beak into a pear.

Below is shown some of that railing. There is no bird feed on it, because instead there is snow. This is a place where it snows rarely enough that when it does it seems like Fun and we take Pictures of it.

I have learned many things from observing the squirrels and birds that feed on that railing.

For instance, did you know that at a certain time of year the male gray squirrel features testicles the size of hubcaps? Pretty unnerving, the first time I saw it. I thought the poor thing was suffering from some horrific disease. But then I noticed all the boys were swaggering around with testicles ten times larger than their heads. So I went to the tubes, and there determined this was in fact Normal, something evolution decided was a Good Idea, when it's the time of year for squirrels to get jiggy wid it. At the same time, the vagina of the female squirrel blossoms hugely out like some come-to-life Judy Chicago plate. It's basically pornography.

At the same time of year as the squirrels are about this blatancy, the place is meanwhile crawling with these beetles I call porn bugs, because the things wander ceaselessly around with their genitalia attached to one another. Sometimes there are threesomes, though that generally causes significant locomotion problems.

There are many more stories of trees and animals from around this place, but this piece has already gone on long enough so as to offend human decency—though maybe not to the extent of squirrel testicles the size of frisbees—so I'll save them for another time.