The Ground at My Feet: Sustaining a Family and a Forest

Weaving lyric essays, poems, natural history, forest science, and a personal and familial account of grief and sustenance, Ann Stinson creates an unusually rich and layered account of life in a family forest in the Pacific Northwest. The theme of transformation as a constant state emerges as she traces the life and death cycles of both humans and trees, and follows the stages of the trees from saplings to marketable wood. Images of slash burning with her father reverberate with a scene in which she spreads her brother’s ashes under young alders. She discovers stories of the Cowlitz Tribe whose ancestral lands include her family’s farm, and she follows new logs on their overseas journey to Japan and Korea. She struggles with the human need to demand more of the land than it can sustain, and reckons with her own childlessness in the face of the burgeoning forest. She asks “when was natural? what is the beginning?” A uniquely personal immersion into Northwest history and the region’s timber and forestry heritage, and a chronicle of a warm and complicated family, The Ground at My Feet is a remarkable addition to the literature of the landscape and ecology of the west.