Happy Aloha Friday. 🌺
Julius Sterling Morton looked at the Nebraska prairie in 1872 and didn't see wasteland. He saw a canvas waiting to be painted. So he proposed a holiday — not a parade, not a monument — just a day to put something in the ground. On the first Arbor Day, April 10, 1872, an estimated one million trees were planted in a single day. Morton never sat in the shade of most of them. That was the point.
I think about that blank canvas a lot. Every Friday, this newsletter is mine. Three hundred and eight of them now. The ritual is the thing — even on the weeks when I wonder if anyone is reading, if anyone is listening. I hope you are. I hope it lands as a small moment of zen, a breath between the noise. But truthfully, even if it doesn't, the making of it matters. The planting is the point.
I was an environmental club president in college. A self-described hippie who found the world — nature especially — brimming with beauty and color and what I can only call motivational energy. There's something about the way it all breaks down and comes back. The cold quiet of winter. The first tentative buds of spring, when the temperature is still arguing with itself, and then suddenly, all at once, new growth erupts from everything and we are born again. That cycle never gets old for me. It's the closest thing I have to a religion.
Which is maybe why L.M. Montgomery always found me the way spring does — all at once, overwhelming, irresistible. I grew up on Anne of Green Gables. Watched every early adaptation. Was swept away by Avonlea every time. Anne Shirley was the vibrant, overbearing, unstoppable dreamer I always wanted to be but wasn't — the kind of girl who would have shouted her feelings from the treetops and meant every word. I was the quiet one. Reserved. Left to daydream alone, soft-spoken where she was electric. I yearned for an outlet and couldn't find one. So I read.
One detail I never got over: the adoptive father's name is Matthew. Make of that what you will.
There's Anne Shirley energy in these newsletters — I know that. The mind moving like a butterfly, erratic and graceful at once, following whatever catches the light. Montgomery gave me permission for that. She wrote from a single island and built a world that fifty million people still live in. She once wrote, "Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it." I believe that. I think that's what this newsletter is, week after week — a small act of remembering.
Montgomery died on April 24, 1942. Five years later, on the same date, Willa Cather died too — April 24, 1947. Two women writers who never met, whose timelines nearly perfectly overlap, who each built entire worlds from a single landscape. Montgomery had her island. Cather had the American prairie.
Cather arrived in Nebraska as a nine-year-old, uprooted from Virginia, homesick, the land around her flat and strange. She wrote later: "This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand. I was little and homesick and lonely...So the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn, that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake." That same treeless Nebraska that Julius Sterling Morton was trying to fix — the canvas Morton painted — was the canvas that made Willa Cather. She went on to write O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, novels that turned the prairie into literature. The tombstone inscription she chose came from My Ántonia — a boy lying in a field, dissolved into the grass and the sun and the sky, feeling for one moment entirely complete:
"...that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."
Two women, one date, two different kinds of roots. One remembered an island. One became a prairie. Both are still growing in whoever is reading them.
Today is Arbor Day. The last Friday of April, every year, since 1872. You don't need a tree. You just need something worth planting.
Weekend Nudge: What's your canvas this week? What are you putting in the ground that you won't see the full return on for years? The planting is the point.
Mahalo Nui. 🌺
— Matthew
