Reetta

“And in a few steps, she’s outside. The smell is on her before she reaches the trees—the scent of resin and wide western places. The clean smell of her childhood’s only untouched days. The music of the trees, too, tuning the wind. She remembers. Her nose slips into one of those dark fissures between the flat terra-cotta plates. She falls into the smell, a devastating whiff of two hundred million years ago. She can’t imagine what such perfume was ever meant to do. But it does something to her now. Mind control. It’s neither vanilla nor turpentine, but replete with highlights of each. A shot of spiritual butterscotch. A sprig of pineapple incense. It smells like nothing but itself, pungent and sublime. She breathes in, eyes closed, the tree’s real name. She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering the morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body’s provinces, across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul’s innermost national park.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The tree is saying things, in words before words. It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“What?” he asks the tree. “What? ” The tree feels no need to reply.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment