My father-in-law Paul loves nature. Hikes in vast forests and scrambling along mountain paths with his best friend and wife, Shirley, were a staple of most of their 63 years of marriage.This always-active couple also cultivated nature in their suburban backyard, creating a mini forest of towering trees, lush underbrush and native wildflowers.When you looked out the large sliding glass door of their family room, trees were all you could see. It was exactly how Paul and Shirley wanted: a view of lush, greenery greeting them every day.”Their forest” was so important to the both of them that, earlier this year, when Shirley opted for hospice care after her long battle with Parkinson’s, she chose her family room and that view as the place where she wanted to leave this world.Paul now lives in a specialty care home so that he gets help with the tasks of daily living due to Alzheimer’s. In addition to needed monitoring of his whereabouts, Paul’s ability to go for long walks has been significantly curtailed by severe stenosis of the spine.Simply put, Paul yearns for freedom to wander where he wants and for and daily contact with nature, even if it’s just sitting outside on the deck of his new home, which he can do in warmer months of the year.But winter, we worried, was going to add another layer of oppression for Paul, who also hates the cold.This had been bugging me for months, and one day, while I was walking our dog in the park, I found one of the answers in the podcast and NPR show, “The Hidden Brain” with Shankar Vedantam and his guest, pyschologist and researcher Ming Kuo. In her research, Kuo has found what we all suspect: That being in nature, even for as short a time as 15 minutes, can offer health benefits, including reducing stress hormones, reducing high blood pressure and increasing the hormones that elevate moods.Since I was walking in a park bursting with summer’s green, I couldn’t agree more. I was feeling great: calm, healthy, happy.Then Kuo mentioned one study that blew my mind: She said that people who looked at pictures of nature could also derive some of the benefits of being in nature. Not as much as actually being in nature, but enough to make the results significant.Boom! I had my answer for Paul. We would find the biggest picture of a beautiful woods for his new apartment, which he often said he liked, except for the view that prominently featured the other half of his building and a small courtyard with just a few trees.So I began an internet search for large images of forests and nature. Quickly, I found companies that make full wall murals, really extremely large stickers that you paste to a wall.We consulted with Paul about the forest picture that he liked the best, and I ordered it for about $100.It arrived in a few weeks, and we eagerly went to Paul’s apartment to install it.Installing it was both easy and challenging. It’s easy because it came in six wall-length panels and all you had to do was peel off the protective backing and afix the panel to the wall.The hard part was lining up the panels and making sure that the .25-inch overlap matched from the top of the piece to the bottom. With a lot of back and forth (read: bickering) and adjusting here and there (read: sticking it on the wall and taking it off several times), it took us about 90 minutes to install the mural.Paul was ecstatic. The smile never left his face once the mural was up, and staff told us that he brought everyone he could into his room to see his new “forest.” And every time we visited, he mentioned how much he loved looking at it and what difference it had made in making his apartment more like his home.But then … tragedy fell. Literally! Paul woke up one morning and the top half of the mural had fallen off the wall.Dean went over at lunchtime and tried to pull it back onto the wall and stick it with temporary pins until we could get a replacement ordered. It looked, frankly, horrible.But the company came through and sent a replacement.This time we took extra time to pressure it onto the wall and to install a strip across the top.Happiness reigns.