The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Charlotte gives up trying to control them. No one suspects yet, but she has already begun to slip into the long private place that each passing year will deepen. She sits in the front seat, navigating maps for her husband and humming Chopin nocturnes under her breath. Dementia starts here, in these days of quiet, automotive sainthood.

Adam knows the real reason. They think he stole. They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.

You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.

He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.

Somehow, she has become an old woman.

And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .