“When you’re falling in Dupont and there’s nobody around, did you ever even crash or even make a sound?” – note on the Dupont Memorial tree, September 2026.
In today’s era of social media and fast moving colloquial culture we’ve all heard the adage “to be loved is to be known” or “to be loved is to be seen.” We also have all likely heard the cliche “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” How do we manage our relationships with gratitude and intentionality in a society built for efficiency and grit? Where do the moments of quiet interruption break through the chaotic hustle of life and all the expectations it demands of us? In a world of finite time and infinite possibilities we often find ourselves cycling between pushing the envelope and playing catch up, with scarcely a moment of pause not corrupted with an impulse to seek the next dopamine hit.
September of 2026 brought a torrential storm to Washington, D.C. that left the city reeling. It wasn’t the power outages, school cancellations, or even the array of felled trees around the city that jarred the waking community. The storm lasted one night and was barely significant enough to cause notice as the Washingtonians slept through the wicked wind and pelting rain. If not for what the storm took with it, D.C. may have kept spinning with none to the wiser.
In the North end of Dupont Circle rested an oak tree. A fixture for residents just passing through upwards of 55 years, it stood decades older and tall.
Now it lies in the dirt.
A 15 foot tall stump is what is left. That and roots that trip you as you approach, all knobs and bulging grooves like limbs hugging the soil for dear life.
It is easy to assume the mundane nature of a fallen tree in a park, especially after a storm that forced the closure of schools because of fallen trees on power lines. Trees are almost as commonplace storms in the area – proximity to the Atlantic coast leaves D.C. in the outskirts of fickle, thunderous Summers.
So what is the importance of a fallen tree in Dupont Circle? One of many trees felled and no longer one of the many that still stand.
Community.
Community is the importance of the old fallen oak. For generations humanity has connected with trees and found them kindred – “the shared history of humans and oaks also generated cultural and emotional relationships that translated into symbols or were incorporated into religious beliefs and mythology.”
One person wrote a note.
They expressed gratitude, hope, joy, grief for the tree that once stood and the people who would miss it, who would notice its absence. A conversation between dozens of people in the neighborhood flourished on notes written and tacked to the stump. Praise, thanks, well wishes, and promises to not take for granted what we have. Conversations across generations, neighborhoods, and backgrounds lit up the North end of Dupont Circle as men in suits, children in strollers, teenagers with friends, elders walking dogs all paused.
And they talked.
Asked questions about the storm, if they slept through it or watched from windows. Shared their favorite notes and pointed out sketches and drawings. Traded stories of living in the city — mornings running by the tree, afternoons lazed underneath, and evenings using it as a halfway marker toward home.
The tree reminded the neighborhood it wasn’t just an environment, it was an ecosystem. That we care for one another and that we should say it (or write it down).
Let your routine be interrupted and celebrate the dose of community that comes in appreciating the mundane. We are only strangers as long as we don’t see one another.
“And the tree was happy.”
