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Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This

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is Forest Stories. I'm the Poet in the Forest, a

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children's series that I pinned out in the nineteen nineties. Now,

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none of it would be possible if it wasn't for

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this forest right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I

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talk about it so much that I thought maybe it's

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time that you get to know what has inspired me

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for thirty years. Thanks for being a part of the conversation.

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Welcome back to the forest. There's no hidden fact. Nineteen

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ninety seven, February of that year, we started a journey

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planting seventeen hundred trees inside this collection of trees. And

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the reason why is because of a thing called acid rain.

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You never hear of acid rain anymore, but the trees

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that are in this forest were dying very quickly. They

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were falling, and so I felt it in my heart, well,

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I don't want a bear land here because that's going

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to cause even more destruction when it comes to erosion.

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I know, let's plant trees. So I got together with

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people from the Boy Scouts as well as the state

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of North Carolina, and we started the journey to plant

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seventeen hundred trees in February of nineteen ninety seven. What

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I didn't know is what would happen, and that is

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an umbrella would take shape above our heads. Tree limbs, branches,

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leaves a lot of shade. Now, a lot of people

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in the South crave that shade because they believe it

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helps keep you cool. That's not true. When you have

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an umbrella of trees above you, it keeps that heat inside,

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and all of a sudden, the heat and the humidity

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begin to fry your brain. Not only that, but it

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tortures the ground below the area where we had green,

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I mean weeds, some grass green, which is what I love.

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I love green. But when you plant seventeen hundred trees

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and that umbrella is above you, no, the green doesn't

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last because it needs the sun in order to survive.

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So it took on the shape of an honest to

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God real forest floor to help make it look nice

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and to accept the beauty of the natural forest. What

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we would do is we would work with tree cutters

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that would send over the remains of trees because they

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would chop them up in the wood shipper. So we

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would take the woodships and we would put it on

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the forest floor. And then I heard another calling. It

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was this year twenty twenty five, all these chapters later

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plants something so they can become green again. What Yeah,

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I wanted to be green again. That's what I hurt

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in my heart. So it was like, we got to

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do it, and so I planted all of this beautiful

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natural grass. And what's so funny about that is that

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we had to clear all of the woodships out what

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was left of them very fertile soil, whereas back in

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nineteen ninety seven it was pretty much clay. It was ugly.

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It really was being brutalized by the erosion. That's why

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we planted the trees. But now the land was very fertile,

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and I hurt in my heart. Find the green. So

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we did. A week and a half after we planted

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the seeds that would create the green, I walked outside

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and there are deer laying in that grass, big dough

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and I just sat there and I thought, is this

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what I heard nature saying, give me a place to rest.

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Don't usually find deer laying on the ground unless they're tired,

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and they don't sleep at night, trust me not. What

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the coyotes around here, but all of that green that

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I was asked to put back in the ground has

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become the bed for those that are deer? Am I angry? No, no,

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this force doesn't belong to me. I'm just somebody who writes,

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and I write poetry as well as real life things.

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But did walk out there and to see the deer

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laying in all of that green? I'm not sure you'd

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even find that in a Disney movie. And thanks for

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being a part of the conversation.