FROM THE EDITOR

Molly Backes, Communications Coordinator

Happy summer, everyone! You may notice that this issue is a little different than usual. For one thing, we don’t have a theme this month. Or... we have a few. Most months, the theme of this newsletter is the same as the monthly worship theme, which the worship team uses to shape their services and which many of us discuss in our journey circles. But the summer months don’t have official worship themes, and anyway we’re packing two months’ worth of content into this issue! We’re looking forward to two great months of community, family, and fun—including an All UU Gathering at Vilas Park on August 13, when we’ll meet up with members from James Reeb and Prairie to worship and feast and play together—so we decided that our unofficial theme should just be “Summer.”

But then Janet found some great content in the UU Soul Matters resources around the theme of “Play,” and our friend Rev. Suzelle Lynch is leading a service on July 2 called “The Power of Play,” and Rev. Kelly AJ is giving a sermon called “The Play’s the Thing” on July 16, so our theme is also “Play.” And then I fell down a research rabbit hole about our Signature Oak Trees (more about that in a second), and decided I needed to write about them, but our oaks don’t really fit the theme of “Summer” or “Play,” so our theme is also “Molly Talks About Trees.”

Another difference is that this issue has service descriptions for both July and August. If that’s confusing, we also post service descriptions on our website, Facebook page, and Instagram account, so you can always check in those places as well.

The last difference is a small one in terms of formatting, but a big one for our community: July 1 marks the beginning of the new year for our

Board of Directors! Outgoing Board president Alyssa Ryanjoy shares her reflections on page 6, and we can look forward to hearing from our new Board President Jenny Seeker Conroy in the future. You’ll find a complete list of the 20232024 Board on the last page of this newsletter.

Now back to the thing where I fell down the rabbit hole. Because we didn’t exactly have a theme for this issue, I thought I’d write my editorial essay about the group of four large trees just north of the Landmark side of the building. And then I thought, “I wonder how old they are?”

As a writer, I am accustomed to following branching paths while doing research. One question leads to more, and next thing you know it’s four hours later and you’ve learned a lot about what kinds of suitcases people carried in 1941 but haven’t yet written a single sentence. It’s one of the dangers—and joys —of writing.

Trying to answer the seemingly simple question of how old our oak trees are sent me down many unforseen paths, but in this case, it was all joy. I exchanged many emails with ecologist extraordinare Brent Haglund and later spent an hour outside with him, looking at our trees and learning about our prairie. I dragged our facilities manager Tom Miskelly into my process, I sent about a hundred texts to my friend at the UW ecology lab, I dug through our archives. In the end, I had so much information that I decided to break it into two essays. This month, you can read about the historical, ecological, and spiritual significance of our oak trees. You’ll just have to wait until September to find out how old they are!