The Fibonacci Forest

When she was one year old, to celebrate, her mother, the botanist, planted her a tree; and when she turned two, they planted another; and when she turned three, her father, the mathematician, switched them into another tradition—a Fibonacci sequence of trees: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on, so by age thirteen, they planted her 233 trees, and by twenty, when her father was already gone, she and her mother planted 6,765 trees.

She dreamt of living to a hundred, in a forest so thick no one could even climb through it, because by then trees would beget more trees; and this act, which had started as an act of will by her family—an effort to share her birthday with nature, but also to control nature, as a patron does—would be subsumed by nature itself: the forest growing more forest so it'd be impossible to tell which parts of nature were hers and which belonged to nature itself. In one sense, the woods were hers entirely, existed because of her; and in another sense, she knew they would continue long after she herself was gone and forgotten, and this made her happy and it made her sad.

"This is my tree. This is my first tree." All the subsequent trees were planted in a widening circle around that first one, so the youngest trees were at the outside, and the forest grew taller and older toward the center. When she turned twenty, and her oldest tree turned nineteen, she built her house in the canopy of that tree, and the house grew higher and farther from the ground each year; and when she turned twenty-five and was already surrounded by thousands of trees, she fell in love and married; and when she turned thirty she had her first child, and she and her husband started a new circle of trees at the edge of her forest, so her daughter's forest grew to mingle with her own like the way the daughter herself grew—adjacent and sometimes intermingled, but distinct, too, and pushing out in her own directions. A few years later, they started a new forest for her son, at the opposite corner, and finally four children in all, each one with a forest growing higher and wider, canopies intertwined, and houses on the highest points of all of them: they grew farther apart, and higher, too, till they forgot the look of the ground and each other, and remembered only the trees.