A childhood belief about plants

I used to believe that trees were not alive, so sometimes my brother and I would go outside with his little plastic tool set and chip bark off of the ones in our front yard. We always got tired of playing construction workers with the toy wood block that never even changed when we hammered it, so we liked to pretend that we were doing "important work" on the trees.

When I learned in school that trees were actually alive, I felt so bad about hurting ours! I figured it must have been like were were chipping off their skin and they probably hated us now. When I got home, I hugged our trees and apologized to them. Needless to say, we never "worked" on the trees again.