About 80 yards from our front porch, on what some would call a lawn and others a field, there is an eruption that looks a little like a green wave breaking on a rock. It’s not an unusual sight for a Vermont hillside where the mowing has to stop for a stump or a stone, leaving behind a DMZ of weeds and tall grasses.

In this particular spot a massive pasture pine once stood, a tree good only for the play of children. From its branches we hung a tire swing and a trapeze, and high above the ground where the trunk divided into three, we wedged a platform. The tree served our children well, and a generation later the voices of our grandsons echoed from updated swings hanging from the same branches. By then the tree had grown gangly, and one night in a heavy snowstorm a third of it came down.

That was nearly a decade ago. Thinking about safety, we hired a tree company to remove what remained of that pine (and four others while they were at it), a process that transformed a broken view full of sweet memories into an open, rolling expanse I would have to mow. Left behind were five stumps, the most prominent one a sore reminder of what we had lost.

But why dwell on loss? Today a better swing hangs not far away from a crossbar between two sturdy maples, and that old stump is a natural wonder that changes every year. One summer it was home to a cloud of angry wasps. A year or two later snakes moved in. This summer the stump is a riot of black raspberry with pastel canes, purple flowers, and dark fruit. My son occasionally reminds me that for a little more money, I could hire a machine to grind up the stump, but I have opted for what the poet Robert Frost called “…the slow smokeless burning of decay.”

I can see a metaphor when I stumble over it, but I’m not sure what this one means. Certainly, it has something to do with sentimentality and the passage of time, but as I close the book on my eighth decade, nothing is clearer than the inevitability of change. Evaluating change requires naked honesty, there being such a fine line between the sweetness of sentiment and the tar pit of sentimentality.

My granddaughters never really knew this old tree. The younger hadn’t been born, and the older was just a toddler watching from a window that rainy November day when men used machines and ropes to dismantle it piece by piece. The next spring I sawed four of the stumps as close to the ground as I could, but into the fifth I cut rude steps that a young girl could mount to a modest plateau. Whenever my granddaughter reached the top, she’d say, “Papa, you made this for me.”

Being honest about change is confounding because bias is the norm in our culture, and cool objectivity is mocked for being “feckless.” Politicians appeal to our basest instincts by asking, “Are you better off today?” slyly not defining precisely what we are measuring and how. The old naturally believe that the world is going to hell. They remember a time when they felt vital and important, and they know that now they are lagging in a race they once led. Some of our great literature supports their worst fears. Odysseus returns to a debauched kingdom after a heroic absence, and meeting his grown son, he avers that no man can ever measure up to his father. Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is a horrifying narrative about genocide, but its overarching theme is about the inevitable decline of civilization.

To an objective eye, there is plenty to feel terrible about: a planet warming from a fire we feed with our greed, a plague of guns from manufacturers fully aware they are making killing easy, and an anti-intellectualism that hoodwinks the innocent into believing that training and expertise are to be mistrusted.

In contrast, that same objective eye can see so much that is hopeful. Sports are just sports, but they can disprove the claim that the world is in hopeless decline. Recently, Willie Mays died at age 93. He was my hero when I was 12 and an outfielder, and I would always step on second base on my way to the bench. He was the best by far, so good that people still call a putout he made in 1954 “The Catch.” But the truth is that now nearly every day in the Majors, outfielders make spectacular catches inspired by Mays’s revolutionary play. We will see a similar phenomenon this summer at the Olympics: young women and men, motivated by the greatness of their heroes, setting new records that will, in turn, be broken by the next generation of faster, stronger athletes.

Willie Mays didn’t walk on the moon or discover the double helix, but every day — in the ruins of Gaza or in a posh hospital in the East Side, in Mumbai, Dublin, or Rabat — a child is born who may become the best surgeon, poet, or mathematician of a generation. Change is everywhere. Not all of it is good, but the renewal that comes with rebirth contains the seeds for a better world.

Evaluating change means putting bias aside, and this brings me back to my stump, where change, it turns out, was neither bad nor good, just different.

My older granddaughter isn’t as keen on swinging as she used to be, and she’s far too old to have fun climbing a stump the way she did as a toddler. Now she has a mountain bike, and every day that she rides, she gets a little bolder. The last time she was here with her bike, she rounded the stump of the old swing tree, imagining it as a turn in an obstacle course. Soon she will have the moxie to ride right over it.

Jonathan Stableford is a retired educator. He lives in Strafford.