I was sprawled amongst golden grasses for quite some time. I understood I had to leave. The forest was beckoning me with its arms stretched out, wanting me to read their words.
Despite the length of time I stayed there watching her, she did not frown nor did she wink towards me. The orangeness round her brow with her green neckline—I must have tried to ignore her. I laid my head back beneath the shelves of the green thickets, and a small spider with black patterning crawled across my chest. The indents from the insect’s fingers upon my linen dress looked as if the spider scurried about in tepid sand before returning to the understory. Above my vision, a Cooper’s Hawk, with eyes pondering my existence, and likewise I was his, perched on the ends of a semi-vacant branch. A gesture of legs from I, forced the common folk beast to leap from the aching tree and into the aching blue skies. His shadow was what I was to keep from his disappearance.
Beyond, I heard the slight whispers of mothers in gossip while their children, so keen, held hands of patchouli. I smiled at this, surely imaginative indeed, yet I wondered how the children felt when their elders did not look up at the sky as the children did, but rather, looked down at their feet while they walked.
I turned back to her, and found her neighbors to be weeping—perhaps out of jealousy more than anything. I tried to pity those worn, yellow flowers, but the erudite Purple Aster, I could converse with her more. However, she would stay solemn against the brutality of the harsh day.
I decided to part with her, nearly stepping on the poor thing as I got to my feet. I grabbed hold of myself, and wandered further into the decrepit forest some yards away where the pleasant trees cheered me on, waiting for my appearance in their immobile dwelling. From the golden field, I was soon encumbered by thickening, forest shadows that pressed themselves upon my shoulders. The nails of the fingerless trees moved back and forth, and I could hear a slight tugging somewhere deep within. The forest must stretch for miles yonder with an orange-and-yellow array of carpet, but it was not my priority to uncover this.
The forest exhibited a sort of unkempt beauty that toyed with my own beliefs of being. Though my toes did stumble on lost roots and thorn branches, I was able to stop myself from tumbling by placing a hand out along the encasement of a Shagbark Hickory. The force that propelled my body in the crooked position I stood in was nothing I had ever felt previously. I looked upon the forest floor to find but a singular leaf that was more erect than the others on the floor. Had it been fragility that moved me?
The sorrowful tree expelled itself onto the forest floor, yet its skin still hung by a fibreless thread in the shadows. A strangeness of patterned markings rested up and down the tree, and with each deformity I traced my reddened fingers around it. Moving the hair from the corners of my mouth, I shifted my body to place my soiled hand on the hairs of the old trunk.
Ancientness resides in trees. The massive Sequoia trees in California are thousands of years old, and have grown with laughter and sorrow as they watch one place for many years with thickening eyes. Though those multitude of years may be forgotten in a humanoid brain, the memory of a tree is concealed in a cross-sectional depiction of concentric rings.
In the woods I had found an old stump, decorated with such rings, and I sat on its edge tracing my fingers along parts of the rings. These rings dilate or contract based upon the rhythm of each year. The age of a tree is determined by counting the number of rings within the tree. As I sat, I was curious about that tree’s story. Surely the trunk had removed itself, to where I could not tell, yet I knew the tree had not died for its brain was spewed out underneath me, and I was sitting on it! I quickly stood up and admired the sight from afar.
During warmer and wetter years, the rings produced by the tree are wider and represent a good year of growth. When the rhythm becomes off-balanced, due to the kindness or unkindness of the environment, tree rings are thinner and represent a poor year for growth. The oldest rings of a tree are positioned in the center of the tree, whereas young rings are closer to the edge of the tree.
With the coming days, and resettlement into my winter attire, I watched that tree in solitude slowly decay from the forest vicinities until it appeared somewhat lucid. Perhaps it was not the tree itself but rather the forms of life that decayed with the tree in an interconnected framework. What I saw occurring in the sleeping hallows of the canopies and the scattered floor, was vastly varied from the gutturalness of the Shagbark Hickory. A tree’s growth begins in spring and ends in the fall. When the weather gets colder and the Earth begins to freeze over with the precipitation of winter, a new, sound tree ring is formed. This coincides with a new layer of plant tissue called cambium, which lies between the old wood and bark of the tree.
A month had passed. It was not quite the full day, and I found myself at the base of the hickory watching its eyes scour upon me as I judged how swiftly the tops of its arches swayed. Unease sank into my thighs, and with furrowed brows, I questioned a reminiscent scent of petrichor leaves. Without a precursor of thought, I found myself clawing at the Earth underneath my thighs only to find a solid root hardened by the winter soils. This prevented me from going any further down.