canopy

A hot late-summer breeze blows across a Burbank parking lot as Lorde sits beneath a tattered canopy outside the rehearsal studio where she’s preparing for her latest world tour.

Members of Altadena Green, a group of arborists and landscape experts, estimate that the town known for its lush canopy of trees has lost at least 50% of its pre-fire canopy.

Grief, too, steers us, a cleansing ritual, as I recall each time my wife and I meander beneath Green-Wood’s leafy canopy, parakeets swooping and chattering overhead, or sit quietly in its hushed chapel.

They wake up each morning to reminders of apocalypse: blackened stumps and ghostly bare branches where a tree canopy used to be, and bald rocks and makeshift shelters where homes used to stand.

Retractable doors open onto a small pink and green courtyard, and, around the corner, a larger play space shaded by the building’s kaleidoscopic canopy.