Still Standing

In the summer of 2024, I visited the hills above Los Gatos, California. This is where my mother was born, and where her mother died. My mom left as a teenager and never returned, though she longed to. She died in 2014—not as young as her mother, but still too young. I grew up loving this land through her. Visiting it for the first time, some part of me hoped I’d be able to feel her there.

I didn’t. There was no voice in my ear, no sense of being held, no sudden inner knowing—all forms of ancestral connection I have experienced before. In truth, I had been struggling for some time to feel the presence of any of my ancestors, even as my longing for them grew more pressing. Feeling at a loss, I turned to the trees. It was there that connection began to emerge. Writer Rebecca Solnit gives language to this sensation: “The trees made the past seem within reach in a way nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone.”

Trees have always been a place of refuge for me. On the plains of southern Minnesota where I grew up, the sky is immense and the farmland stretches outward in every direction. Interrupting this expanse are small, dark stands of trees. In summer, these groves offer shade and shelter to all kinds of life. In winter, they break the wind and hold back the snow. I gravitated toward them in every season. There was solitude there, and solace. These stands of trees were early teachers, offering a template for belonging that did not require sameness but nourished diversity.

This body of work is a grove of my own making: photographs of trees rooted in the places my ancestors once lived. For those of us who grow up queer, our ancestry also includes elders to whom we are not related by blood—the queers who lived and loved before us, and who, by doing so, helped shape a world better able to care for those who came after. To care for us. That we are living in a time when this care is being eroded makes this grove even more necessary. It slowly grows, as I make new images and revisit older ones. I sit in the company of these trees and listen: “Here we are, still standing. You, too, will be an ancestor one day.”