Kickass celebrates Arbor Day

Kickass, the doorstop dog, says there is nothing personal in the special relationship that dogs have with trees, and on this day-after Arbor Day that is a fact to be reckoned with.   Dogs simply use trees to mark territory because, well, the trees are there and it really does them—the trees, no harm.  The keeper and his ilk, on the other hand do more damage to trees than a gang of Paul Bunyans.  Some 18,000 acres of forest is lost every year to over-harvest, fire disease etc.  The keeper remembers an Arbor Day from his childhood when he and his fellow country-school companions trooped through deep melting snow to view the bloated body of a beaver that had died when a tree that it had obviously been gnawing at somehow jumped off its stump and onto the beaver’s broad tail, pinning it helplessly to the ground.  That odd scene of “tree’s revenge” still looms large in the keeper’s cluttered memory.  And in the midst of his wood paneled house he sometimes pauses by the decorative atrium white pine and realizes that in a way not totally unlike that of the dogs, he uses trees to mark his territory.  Arbor Day—Plant a tree!