No.180. A Swinger of Birches. Abigail, his next-door landscape-painter, had brought him a cup of camomile tea and a shortbread biscuit, and was (he noted wryly) predictably perplexed, if not downright dismayed, by the mural-sized wall of birch bark that covered most of one wall of his studio. "Why would you do this?" she asked him. He tried to come up with" a reason that would satisfy her. "I wanted to feel smaller than a tree," he explained. I wanted to feel engulfed by one. I feel the birch tree is a sort of ladder, a transit, to somewhere else." Abigail looked puzzled. "Do you remember Robert Frost's great poem, Birches?" he asked her. He knew she didn't so he recited some for her: I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. "But why would you go and plunder so much birch bark?" "I didn't" he replied. "The whole thing is made of paper and cardboard."