“In the pines, in the pines,” the song insisted, but for us it was always “in the magnolias.” There were five on the hill in Nashville where my grandparents lived. The Southern kind, Magnolia grandiflora, bull bays. Elegant and unruly, they stayed green come June or January. Their squat trunks were ten, twelve feet apart, but their branches had fanned out, drooped low, and intertwined. For the squirrels and the barn bats, as for my cousins and my brother and me, they made one wide emerald crown.

Lord, I loved those trees that did not love me back. They gave good cover. You could stand beneath them in a downpour and not get wet. Like a tin roof, they turned the rain’s pummeling into ambient percussion. The trade winds hardly rattled them. Snow and ice — even the sleet storm of ’94 that collapsed powerlines all over Davidson County and kept us out of school for weeks — only burnished their …