merican sycamores aren’t native to western Colorado but we’ve got a few around. I’ve always been drawn to the one at the back edge of the orchard. Drawn to? Okay. I’ve wanted it to whisper its secrets to me, of longevity, of peace, of planting roots so thick and strong. It towers over the jonagolds and the braeburns and the honey crisps, dwarfing the neat rows, the hard labor of generations so slight and contrived alongside its wild majesty.

I’ve seen sycamore groves, regal and dense along meandering creeks in the South, their smooth, patchy whiteness and massive green canopies commanding the attention of passersby, their keys fluttering and spiraling in the autumn wind, descendants carried off in the water’s current, the grove swelling year by year.

But this one is alone, nowhere near a creek bed, miles and miles from its closest relative. I imagine a lone samara inside a sack of apple seeds a hundred years ago, and Josh’s great-grandfather tossing it aside on a frosty spring morning as he walked the rows of his would-be orchard, poking a hole with a sharpened stick every ten feet, dropping a seed inside it, and then waiting with the same hope and faith of every farmer that had come before him and would come after him, the samara and the massive tree it would become forgotten long before his noon meal.

Sycamores, like most trees, are rarely self-fertilizing, and so it has grown to adulthood on its own, independent and strong without the benefit of family, without children to pass its legacy to, the occasional human sitting in its shade or raccoon climbing along its boughs. There’ve been squirrels’ nests too over the years, and birds and bugs and fungi—a whole ecosystem from its crown to its roots, keeping it abuzz with life even as the decades have passed with no one to speak its language.

Ever since Teo was tiny, he’s taken his afternoon nap strapped to my back as I’ve made the pilgrimage across the orchard. At first, it was simply to escape the stifling, stagnant late-winter air inside the house. A breath of spring had beckoned to me even as a crisp March wind blew and chunks of icy, stubborn snow still dotted the landscape, so I laid aside my plan to spend an hour in the workshop while Teo slept, bundled us up instead, and set off for a walk. I found myself beneath its immense bare and bone-white crown, momentarily awed by how it could be so regal even in the frigid air.

Later, it was to check for damage in the orchard wrought by a long winter’s brutality, and I wended my way up and down and across the dozens of tidy rows, and I embraced the chance to stretch my lungs and reclaim my body from Teo’s tenancy, my legs and my core recovering a little more each day. In the distance, the sycamore was a quiet, looming fixture on the horizon assuring me that spring had come, its hard green buds bursting to usher it in.

Before long, the sycamore was the reason for my walks, and somewhere on my travels I fell in love with it. The orchard jaunts with my sleeping cargo have become less of a ramble and more of a daily vigil. I stand among its understory and bask in its majesty, meditating beneath mottled branches and inspecting it from roots to crown in case injury or disease has befallen it since yesterday. What was at first an oddity, the matriarch of a family of strangers and utterly out of place alongside the tame Colorado agriculture, has somehow become the order itself, the tie that binds the wild horizon, the only genuinely compelling thing that exists on the border of there and here. And so I build my days around our visits, my year around her seasons, my world around hers—the woodpeckers’ progress from week to week; the litters of chattering squirrel pups; the mosaic of gray and brown and white and green on her trunk; the red-tinged buds that spend the spring growing plump and hard and then bursting into soft, dark fronds that grow into huge papery sheets before sighing in defeat and dropping into heaps of miserable gray-brown come October. By midwinter, she would be empty, there in body but somehow gone in spirit.

Whenever a storm howls, I lie awake picturing snapped branches littering the mossy ground or a season’s worth of leaves and seeds strewn across a dozen miles or her massive trunk violently uprooted and thrown to the ground, root system ripped from the soil and left to cure in the open air, slowly dying.