Seeing The Forest, Losing Sight Of The Trees

A tall, handsome white ash tree shades the east side of our Vermont home. Its golden-brown autumn foliage contrasts with the reds of the sugar maples around it. Its ramrod-straight trunk reminds me of a favorite baseball bat, also ash, that I swung as a boy. This tree should outlive me by many years, but it probably won’t. Every ash tree in eastern North America — an estimated 7.5 billion …