We have A LOT of trees in our yard.  Big ones.  We love them in the spring and summer for their shade and leaves, and are not so fond of them in autumn, when we are cleaning up those leaves.  It's practically a neighborhood requirement to own a leafblower.  During that 3 hour long thunderstorm on Memorial Day, an ash tree in the side yard started to pull out of the ground.  By the end of the week, it fell over, mercifully missing the house.  And yes, a tree DOES make a sound when it falls in the forest! 

We had the tree cut up into firewood lengths that we plan to use in our fire pit out back.  This also led to a great opportunity to figure out how old the tree was.  First we estimated the age of the tree--J guessed 100 years, K guessed 80 years.  Then, starting in the middle, we counted the rings.  We found 73.  I took a pen and marked the tree rings when each of us were born, the year the house was built, and calcualted when the tree was born.  I also showed the girls how some rings were larger than others, indicating the tree grew more in those years, perhaps due to good weather and growing conditions. 

I'll be honest--they were not as fascinated with this process as I was, and it didn't hold their interest for a terribly long time, although the entire activity wasn't time consuming either.  But hopefully they learned a little something about the trees around us and could appreciate nature a bit more.  J did mention a large tree section in the nature center where she goes to summer camp, so she did relate this experience to a past one. 

I know it's hard for them to really understand how different the world would have been in the 1930's, when the tree first started growing.  It's a bit hard for me, too!  Yet in a world where everything seems to happen in an instant and we're told that the newest things must be the greatest, it's nice to take a moment to appreciate something lasted way longer than some electronic gadget.