The back door slammed shut. The woman looked up from her laptop. Her sister?

She headed downstairs barefoot. It wasn’t her sister.

It was the boy.

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The boy’s mother had knocked on her door two year ago. They had just moved in next door. Her boy had tripped under a maple tree and cut his forehead. Did she have a Band-Aid?

The next day, the boy and his mother dropped by again. The boy handed the woman a crayon drawing of the errant maple tree, its winged seeds in flight. The woman looked at the picture, all baby blue and forest green and sunny yellow, the colors of guilelessness. She crouched down to look the boy in the eye. I like trees, too, she said.

The woman was a botanist for an Evanston nonprofit. When she met the boy, she had been working on a PowerPoint for community college students. Here’s which native trees will suffer most from climate change in the Chicago area—red pine, northern pin oak, quaking aspen…In her last presentation to teenagers, no one had asked any questions. Not even when she revealed her big finish, a 3D computer model of trees blinking out across the planet.

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The woman and the boy took walks in south Evanston to look at trees. She noticed that he had started to pick up on her words and body language. One day, when she stopped to study a black walnut tree, he looked up and down the knobby bark. Lovely, the boy said. How lovely.

One spring morning, the woman and the boy paused to listen to the song of a black-capped chickadee. The boy said he had learned something scary in school. As the planet gets warmer, trees like Douglas firs would not get enough water. They might get sick and disappear forever.

The steady drumbeat from her PowerPoint ran through the woman’s head—gray birch, white spruce, Douglas fir…Well, she told the boy, Douglas firs have ways of saving up water. So. Should we go see if Pippy is around?

The two of them passed the brick bungalow where a pit bull named Pippy lived, and the duplex with the wide back porch in front and clotheslines in back. Back home, the boy’s mother pushed the screen door open with a grin. The woman waved and called from the sidewalk that she’d be back next weekend. She wanted to show the boy how to grow a snake plant from leaf cuttings.

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For his birthday, the woman gave the boy a little shovel tied with raffia ribbon. Raffia, she told him, comes from a palm tree that grows big and strong in the heat of the tropics.

The next morning, the boy had pushed open the woman’s back door and let it slam shut. Come see, he said, before she was halfway down the stairs.

She followed him to a sunny spot near her lilac tree. Something the color of straw poked out of the damp soil. She knelt for a closer look.

The boy had planted the strands of raffia and watered them with his Spider-Man water bottle. We’ll grow a palm tree that grows big and strong in hot weather, he said.

The woman closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of lilacs. For the rest of her life, whenever she smelled lilacs, she would think of the boy’s gift. On this morning, a prayer popped into her head. Her grandmother would mutter the words of an Oglala Sioux holy man over hopeless trees on their family farm in South Dakota. The woman knew the prayer by heart: Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds.