I’ve noted on occasion that I tend to go pretty far down the anthropomorphism path. An example: our house was long shaded by wonderful old trees.

I loved them for their natural beauty, their cooling us from the summer’s heat, their enveloping us with privacy. Sitting beneath them or watching from a window as their leaves swished in the breeze, I invariably felt calm and relaxed.

Over time, a number of these trees became ill. We always waited til we’d received solid confirmation that they were dying, when we had no choice but to take them down before they toppled onto our house in a storm.

That potential became frighteningly real during a severe windstorm last year, when three enormous nearby trees fell, their roots yanking up huge chunks of sidewalk and leaving deep holes. They severely damaged a house and two cars…