In Seattle, 1962, a handful of cedar trees towers over a small neighborhood park. For hundreds of years, they have presided over picnics, beatings, weddings, maulings, children’s games, and misunderstandings.
Just down the block from the park, Lex Mertz is born wrong. Her mother Mimi had wanted a docile, delicate, adoring daughter, but Lex is passionate, headstrong, and physical, and she and Mimi are at odds from day one. Mimi resents Lex for the enormous disappointment.
Lex’s junior year of high school, she befriends and falls in love with Natalie Freeman, one of a few hundred Black kids bused in from another neighborhood. Mimi opposes their relationship, and the steps she takes to end it haunt Lex for the next forty years.
In 2020, during a pandemic and the year of the Black Lives Matter movement, Lex thinks she sees a masked Nat through a downtown storefront window. The vision prompts her to start a series of five portraits. The paintings might just help set some things right in a damaged world beset by racial strife, resource inequity, and the effects of climate change, in which trauma is an inheritance and people are separated by masks, by race, by gender, from other species, and, finally, from their own true selves.
The Cedars is a literary novel of 100,400 words.