“Not my thing,” I said. “Much more of a city boy.”
“Well, city boy, you won’t find any coffee shops or fancy shopping boutiques here.”
“No, I figured that out.”
We continued on. The trees around us were tall, much taller than any trees I had ever seen. Or read about. They seemed so tall that they did not even fit into the landscape. It was as though they were from some other place and had been planted here by mistake. Or as a joke.
I reached out to them as we passed by. It felt good to touch their barks, rough and dry. Why would creation come up with such water hogs? I wondered. With these beasts around, there couldn’t be much water left for anything else in environments like this.
“They sure do shed a lot of leaves,” I said.
“It’s what makes the forest so healthy,” said Penelope. “E
