Home Bittersweet Home

Every time I see a bird sitting on top of a wood pile, I assume he or she is looking for their home. Hoping to retrieve momentos of their life, chick photos, before and after photos of the nest, anniversaries, birthdays. You know: all those things we collect in our homes because we think we are going to be there forever and someone will want them when we are gone.
But the trees are gone and the birds are still here.
For now.
I think there is a permanent scar on my heart because of all the clearcutting that is happening around here. I feel it every time my heart beats, this little pull, a little pain, from the original wound of 2009 when the woods way back were flattened, opened up again in the summer of 2013 then the winter of 2013-14.
The latter being the worst. The wound reopened with a rusty, jagged knife, a wound that didn't heal well.
Back even further, beyond the woods we bike through, beyond the very end of this unimproved road that takes us through those woods, there are more woods being destroyed.
One was flattened through the winter and another one is going now.
We can actually hear the sounds of machines all the way to our home.
The sound that peels the scab off that puckered wound in my heart.
As I walked along the road this morning in the sunshine, I could hear the whining of the machines in the distance -- yet I was walking next to the clearcut of last winter. So many trees are being destroyed and no one is replanting. The cut of 2009? Not replanted. The cut of last summer? No sign of any intention to replant.
This is my new obsession. Trees. Before we cut them down and use them, they are already homes and fuel and food. They provide us with oxygen and shade and beauty. I truly am starting to ponder a world without trees.
No trees, no bees. It ain't gonna be pretty. 
My husband is going through a tree planting phase, inpsired by the loss of the woods next to us. More than a dozen trees planted by the end of this month. But it feels like we are bailing out an ocean liner with a sand bucket. Too little too late.