We left the homestead at 4:42 a.m. because Margaret prefers a soft arrival, and by the time we hit the third switchback into Pisgah, Ember had already opened the window to let the car air out — Cade had eaten a clementine in the back seat the day before, and citrus oils, as my friend Wren has been begging me to understand, are perceived by hardwoods as a low-grade insult. I had the offering basket on my lap. I had the unfiltered spring water from the gas station outside Brevard that everyone in our group agrees is the only ethical water within county lines. I had, God help me, hope.
Margaret is a 240-year-old eastern hemlock about a mile and a half off a trail I’m not going to name, because the last time I named her trail in print a man from Charlotte tried to hug her wearing Old Spice. I have visited Margaret every Earth Day week for six years. The first year I went to apologize on behalf of my marketing career. The second year I went to apologize on behalf of my marketing career again, because she had not accepted it the first time. By year four we were, I felt, in real conversation.
This year she would not look at me. I know how that sounds. But anyone in Old-Growth Whisperers of the Southern Appalachians (12,400 members, very tight ship, no crystals allowed in the photos because it confuses the moss) will tell you a hemlock can absolutely hold the line on her gaze, and you feel it the second you step into her drip line. My friend Petra, who took a weekend intensive in Floyd County with a woman who used to do reiki for racehorses, calls it “canopy turning.” Margaret had turned her canopy.
I sat on the root flare for a full forty minutes trying to figure out what I had done. I had brought the right offerings. I had not worn anything dyed with petroleum. I had even left my phone in the car inside a small linen sack of dried nettle, which my sister-in-law Jess — she does intake at a pediatric office in Weaverville and has, at this point, basically a working clinical understanding of EMF — says is the only way to mute a device on consecrated ground. And still: cold. Closed. A hemlock with her arms crossed.
Then I remembered. Two weeks ago I purchased, from a Target, a reusable tote that said EVERY DAY IS EARTH DAY in a font I now realize was designed by a committee. Margaret knew. Of course Margaret knew. There is a Telegram channel my husband’s cousin’s wife forwards me from called The Greenwash Ledger, and they have been documenting since 2022 that any cotton tote produced for an Earth Day promotion contains what they call “intent residue” — the chemical aftertaste of a marketing meeting where someone said the words “sustainability vertical.” You cannot wash it out. You can only burn it, in a fire built from wood you personally identified.
I want to be careful here, because I am not anti-corporation, I am anti-pretending. There is a difference between a company that quietly composts and a company that puts a leaf on a yogurt cup. Margaret can tell the difference. I have watched her tell the difference. In 2022 a hiker walked past her drinking a Liquid Death and her needles physically perked up, and that is not me being poetic, that is me telling you what my pupils saw.
I will say — because I believe in a generous reading of even the most disappointing Earth Day — that Margaret did, at one point, drop a single cone directly into Ember’s lap, which the group has reviewed and agreed is at minimum a partial absolution for the children, who are blameless. The tote, which I had foolishly brought with me to carry the offerings, I left at the trailhead inside a cairn I built specifically to contain it until I can return next week with cedar matches.
So this Earth Day, while everyone else is sharing infographics and buying a $14 candle that says LOVE THE PLANET in soy ink, I am going to be sitting in my mudroom hand-writing six pages of apology — one for each year — on paper I made last fall from the corn husks our neighbor Dale gave us. I’ll mail them to the trailhead post office in an unsealed envelope, because Margaret reads through wind. I will keep you posted on whether her canopy turns back. My intuition says by Pentecost. My sister-in-law says sooner. The tote, for the record, is still up there. It can sit with what it did.