Ash
The pile of firewood in the driveway is mostly ash, which is dying left and right because of a beetle. On the logs you can see the larvae's path under the bark, a tunnel they eat out of the cambium, which inadvertently kills the tree.
I'm not sure what to make of it. They are willy-nilly. Sometimes the paths seem leisurely, other times confused, an arborist's Rorschach test. My temptation is to say that whatever I think of the beetle's intentions is probably too much, but I know this is probably a mistake; most of the time these things turn out to be much smarter than I would guess. But I do hope they are having fun.
I wonder about the ash trees. They sprout avidly from seed and the young ones don't seem to be bothered by the pest. Will they revert to a shrub form for a few decades (or centuries?) before the beetles get their ecological comeuppance? I can only wonder; I'll surely be dead before then.
I remember reading about hazelnut trees during the Ice Age. The scientists were looking at old pollen from the mud at the bottoms of lakes, and trying to piece together how the hazels had spread so quickly to flower at the rate that they did. And the best answer they could come up with was that the trees were always there, in shrub form, reproducing clonally, probably for tens (hundreds?) of thousands of years. It was too cold for them to reproduce sexually, their little sexy bits would very literally get frozen off, but they could still hold their own as divisible shrubs, aided in part by the instability of Ice Age soil, which can melt and implode and move around and do all sorts of weird things. And when things finally warmed up, boom. More pollen than you can shake a stick at.
In the deepest winter, there are these gnats that dance in the sunlight if it goes even a tiny bit above freezing. I often wonder if they hide out somewhere from the cold, or if they hatch from eggs and live only for that thaw on a single day. I suspect the latter.
In any case, I feel a bit like one of those gnats when I look at my pile of firewood, unable to fully comprehend a cycle of death and regeneration that I only touch at its farthest margins.