The Grove

When the Smiths put money down on that plot of land, it was all trees. Maples and beech, wild cherry and ironwood; ash, oak, hickory, elm. The boys must’ve measured their hours by axe-stroke some days as they put their shoulders to the slow, sweaty work of clearing land. To make room for wheat, rye, and oats, for buckwheat and beans they brought down maybe six thousand trees— those towering majesties—some saplings before Columbus laid eyes on their world’s distant shore.

But those boys laid their axes aside long before the land was bare. Spared some three thousand of the land’s old companions, knowing man does not live by bread alone. They left trees to blunt the wind, to offer sap for sugar and fuel against the winter’s cold. Kept a piece of that old, wild wood where they could go to think, or, perhaps, to pray.

The Smiths left. The trees stayed.

It was thirty years and good rail lines later when Seth Chapman put money down on the place the Smiths had once helped farm. Those were different days: no one kept woods when they could plant cash crops, and so tree by tree, all around the neighborhood, the old forest was turning into new money. But Seth could never bring himself to put an axe to the trees on the west end of his lot. And he told his son the story of why he’d kept it: of the vision it was said once opened among the maples and beech, wild cherry and ironwood, the ash, oak, hickory, and elm.

There are trees there today that were tall already when Joseph Smith was young. And who can know if God shielded them because the grove is sacred— or if He just wanted to keep at least one old patch of green?