Congratulations to Alyssa Belanger-Haig, winner of our 2025 Project Forest Tree Story Contest.
Alyssa’s story is a moving reflection on the quiet companionship of trees – holding space for childhood wonder, personal loss, growth, and the promise of generations to come.
Thank you, Alyssa, for sharing your story with us.
There’s this place down an old gravel road, one that used to serve as the primary way to connect my hometown to the next town over. Down this road there is a lake and on the shore of this lake there was a tree. A beautiful, gnarled old jack pine.
This grandfather tree had a bend in trunk the perfectly held me when I laid down on it, usually with a book in hand. It held me through the loss of my grandmother, the changing tides of puberty, of moving away from home, and held me closely when I returned for the summer of my early 20s.
This grandfather who watched me grow from child to teen, to young adult to mother was struck by lightning when I was 28. A fire started that blazed through his home, the land was scarred.
Its been 5 years since the fire, and while all that remains of the grandfather pine is a small, charred stump, I look around and see all the new ones growing and think how they will grow with my children, perhaps even my grandchildren, and I have to thank that old tree for what it gave up to support the next generation.
– Alyssa Belanger-Haig
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