There are many ways to count your days and remember the life you are living. Pictures are a great way. These days we take more than ever. We post them, text them, store them in the cloud but rarely print them. I miss that about the days of Kodachrome and Fox Photo. You had to wait and you were never sure how—or if—they would be worth posting. That meant worth posting on your fridge with a magnet. Plus, there was something about digging into that box where the photos lived while we did other things. It was like opening a box of treasure. And holding that memory in your hand was like holding the past, actually touching it.
Getting together with family and friends certainly leads to making some withdrawals from our memory banks. Sometimes we need that help to get the story straight. Age too often claims its prize by keeping those thrilling days of yesteryear from our mental video playback. So, you help each other fill in the blanks when the facts become fuzzy. Think of it as the original cloud storage.
I discovered a memory jog recently that I hadn’t ever considered. It’s a rather odd way to recall the past and bathe in a wave of nostalgia. It’s a different sort of snapshot of your past where the medium provides the dates and you provide the memories.
When a rather rambunctious storm blew through, it toppled a neighbor’s tree into the power lines across the street. While leaving us in the dark in the present, it served to shine a light on the past. Once the tree was cut off the line and the power restored, I took a close look at the remaining stump.
Being the nerd that I am, I counted the rings, curious to learn the tree’s age. I counted twice to be sure. Both times I came to the same conclusion. That pine tree and I were born the same year. Not only were we saplings at the same time, but as a young child, I lived not even a mile down the street from the tree. Back then the house it guarded until that fateful storm didn’t exist and likely some of the other trees around it didn’t either. How odd that we would start out so close together and that I would be living next door when my sibling sapling met his demise. Being saplings at the same time and growing up so close together kind of makes the tree my botanical brother.
As I counted the rings, I recalled the memories. There’s ring number six. That’s when we moved to North Carolina. At ring number 12 I remember moving back to Lake Lanier and spending hours exploring the woods along the shoreline at our home. At 16 the driver’s license was acquired and two rings later I was off to college.
The more I counted, the more milestones I encountered, like so many historic markers on the highway of life. Marriage, children, the loss of loved ones and the thought of friendships made were all attached to each concentric circle of tree growth. More than my life, I thought of the life of the tree.
While I was playing in the dirt with my Tonka trucks just down the road, it was watching the city pave and improve the street in front of it. As I started kindergarten, the tree watched men in trucks sting new lines on the poles along the street as cable television arrived in Gainesville. Much later, while Kate and I were busy raising our children, it watched the construction of our current home.
Trees are timeless in a way we can’t really wrap our heads around. Birds flit in and out of their hair. They cradle squirrels’ nests in their arms. They become islands of shade in the summer and can be beacons of brilliance in the fall. They endure the elements of rain, wind and sun all of which in the wrong measure can bring them down. They see people come and go. Hiking, camping, building, bickering, loving, living and dying. Trees see it yet say nothing. They are silent sentinels that often remind us of our own mortality.
All that’s left now is a stump. The rest has been cut up and carted away. No doubt dumped in a landfill to return to soil from whence it sprang. It reminds me that one day I’ll be mulch too. Perhaps it’s being reminded of this in such an odd way that has so captured my attention.
One more thing. Beside the stump there is another sapling making its way into the world. No doubt the offspring of my botanical brother.
Hmm…does that make me an uncle?
