A neighbour of mine who did tree work for a living was killed up a sixty-foot maple after a branch he was cutting from the crown fell the wrong way, wrapping its anchor rope around his chest and asphyxiating him. He was a young man, the father of two small children, and his funeral, at our town in the Catskills, was crowded with friends and relatives in a state of raw grief. In the slow-moving line outside the funeral home people were sobbing, clutching each other, and exchanging details of the accident in incredulous whispers. The fire department didn't have a tall enough ladder to reach his body. They had to borrow a bucket ladder from a local contractor. He was blue by the time they grappled him down...

At first they thought the white things in the trees were plastic bags. You saw that back in Brooklyn all the time: scraps of sheeny litter caught in the branches of sidewalk ginkgos and sycamores. But out here in the middle of the French countryside it was a shock.