Nora traveled lightly. Her backpack carried a trowel, a bundle of saplings, and a small notebook where she sketched maps of every place she’d been. It was not a glamorous life, but it was hers.

For the past ten years, she had traveled from town to town, city to city, planting trees in places where no one thought they were needed—or cared to plant them. Sidewalks cracked by neglect, factory grounds long abandoned, and barren highwaysides were her canvas. She wasn’t paid, and there was no grand plan, just a quiet conviction: she would leave the world better than she found it.

Her mission began when she was a child. Her grandmother often spoke of planting trees on their family farm in Iowa. “You plant knowing you may never sit beneath their shade or eat their fruit,” her grandmother had said one summer afternoon. “But someone will. That’s how we show love for people we’ll never meet.”

Nora had never forgotten those words. When her family lost the farm during a financial crisis, and her dreams of taking over the land vanished, she vowed to carry that legacy forward, even if it couldn’t be in the fields of her childhood.

One crisp autumn morning, Nora arrived in a small town with wide streets and narrow minds. The air smelled of exhaust, and the nearest park was ten miles away. She wandered to an overgrown lot behind a strip mall, where discarded bottles and faded wrappers lay like scars.

Here. This would do.

She planted a red oak, digging through the compacted earth with effort and care. Then a honey locust. Then a flowering dogwood. A shopkeeper came out, wiping his hands on his apron.

“What are you doing?” he asked, voice tinged with suspicion.

“Planting trees,” Nora said, not pausing in her work.

“Why?”

Nora smiled faintly. “Because someday, someone will need them.”

The shopkeeper frowned but said nothing more. Over time, he saw her return, tending to the young trees, watering them during dry spells, and picking up the litter that threatened their growth. He started bringing her water and sandwiches, curious about her purpose.

“You don’t even live here,” he said one day. “What do you get out of this?”

Nora glanced up at him, brushing the dirt from her hands. “I don’t need to get something. Someone else will.” She gestured to the saplings around her. “In 30 years, these will be tall enough to shade this lot. Maybe kids will play here. Maybe you’ll see them while you’re taking a break. It’ll matter to someone, even if I’m not around to see it.”

The shopkeeper didn’t respond, but a few weeks later, Nora noticed a sign he’d posted in the window: Hope for Tomorrow: Planting Trees Together. Beneath it was a clipboard where customers could sign up to help her.

Nora hadn’t expected followers, but they came. A teenager who wanted to make his town less gray. A mother who thought her kids deserved to see flowers bloom near home. An older man who had lost his wife and found peace in digging holes for new life.

Nora didn’t stay in the town long after the first leaves began to unfurl on the saplings. Her work called her elsewhere. But the trees remained, and so did the people she inspired. Years later, strangers strolled through what became a community park, picnicking and laughing under the wide branches of the red oak and honey locust.

Nora never saw it, but she didn’t need to. As she walked the edges of another town, scouting her next planting, she whispered her grandmother’s words: We plant knowing we may never sit beneath their shade, but that’s how we love people we’ll never meet.