Among the benefits of investing in an existing structure, as opposed to building a new one, is that you usually inherit mature trees on the property.

This was most definitely the case with our converted church in the center of town, a little village on the Wisconsin-Illinois border. We had a number of big, beautiful trees on the lot. We ended up removing a few of the elderly Chinese elms, but the rest of them just needed a little pruning and love.

The stars in our yard are the pine trees. Somebody in the congregation long ago planted a number of pine trees that grew to forty or fifty feet tall in the decades since that prescient decision. They tower over the church roof.

Immediately upon taking possession of the property three years ago, we had the lowest branches on the two pine trees closest to the building trimmed dramatically (it took me and our hired man hours to haul all those branches to the burn pile). Some of the branches were draped across the roof, and they had to go. But since that extreme haircut, the scars have healed. I can barely get my arms around half the trunk of the biggest pine tree, it’s so massive (and I have long arms!). I stare into those towering branches next to our patio when I am in savasana, the final resting pose at the end of almost every yoga practice–at least, when I’m lucky enough to do yoga outdoors (which is out of the question, even in Texas, this time of year). It’s supremely calming to listen to the wind in those branches, and contemplate how those branches were reaching skyward long before I was born. Depending on my luck and the tree’s, those branches might be writing poems on the sky long after I’m gone, too.

If the true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit, a quote alternately attributed to author Nelson Henderson or Elton Trueblood, my husband decided to repay those long-ago congregants by planting a new pine tree in our yard last fall.

After we cut down those Chinese elms on the property line, Tyler determined we needed a little more greenery between us and the neighbors. So this little spruce tree took up residence between two of the bigger pines just off the driveway. If we had been around for Christmas, I would have been tempted to hang lights on this tree, it was so perfectly Christmasy.

In my youth, I didn’t consider myself a nature lover, but the longer I enjoy the eternal newness that comes from sunrises, sunsets, plants and yes, trees, the more I appreciate it.

“Of all man’s works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.”

~Henry Ward Beecher