Imprints

The day was bright and sunny. Fluffy white clouds billowed high into the air. An old rocking chair rested on the porch of a bygone house in a wood. Back it rocked, creaking, as an elderly little lady, owner of the house and chair, sat down and began to sink into the soothing rhythm of gently rocking it back-and-forth, back-and-forth. Taking her knitting needle in hand, she eyed the view in front of her, and began to knit. Men were trudging through her wood, measuring and grinding their way, filling her quiet home with the sounds of machinery slicing, grating, and chopping. Plumes of powder in the clear sky marked their ascent towards her. She was aware that they wouldn’t take all of the trees. Some would be left, and she knew that people did indeed need places to live. This land didn’t belong to her, it never had, not legally. The men would not be here if it had. She would never have been able to sell it--- to let it go. It belonged to her memories.

She stared at the largest tree, a huge, sweeping maple that stood tall some distance beyond her porch. On it were carved the names of every person in her family for twelve generations. She fancied that it looked proud, though how a plant could feel emotions she knew not, but she fancied all the same. She knew that tree, every crevice of it. She knew the place at the roots where a badger had made its home years and years ago, the hole where she once had climbed to escape chores, pirates, or the neighborhood children during man-hunt. She knew the knot-hole where her family for generations had left clandestine notes for friends or relatives. Most obviously, she knew every mark her family had left on the bark of that old tree, from the names of the first ancestors to settle in that area to the most recent addition of her grandchildren’s names. Centuries of history, generations of family, hundreds of thousands of memories scrolled into the bark, immortalized. Hundreds of people woven together by their common blood, the memories they left for each other, and the and the marks they had all made on one ancient tree. She had known many of those people, now gone.

She remembered her old great-grandfather’s gruff voice as she and her cousins and siblings trailed after him excitedly or occasionally with sighs as he would tell them again and again in great detail of his skills for tracking and hunting; he informed them that real live Indians had taught him in his younger years. He always loved to tell stories of the Indians and how he was great friends with them and was allowed the honor of marrying the chief’s youngest daughter when they fell in love. He always had a great love and respect for her family and heritage. She remembered her grandmother who kept a collection of beautiful teacups and a box of decorated spoons, who loved to throw tea parties for the younger girls in their family. She would let them go into her closet and find her hat boxes to dress themselves. Soft, colorful scarves and hats with ribbons and other finery came out of those boxes to bedeck the heads of giggling little girls as they sat around a table with their painted spoons and China tea-cups. Polite conversation in English accents issued from their lips as they sipped, laughing the afternoons away. The names of these and more were written in the trunk of the much-loved old Maple.

The old woman looked and knew that some might see the marks of her family as ugly and harmful to the tree, but to her they were marks of a peculiar kind of love. How could she have explained to these men who came to cut it down that this tree was a fixture, a memory, a keeper of memories; all that remained of the people she had loved who had passed before her? Impressed in this tree were the imprints of people she would never see again. Now there would be houses where her beloved tree once stood, the tree she had climbed when days were sunny and cried under when they were not. And yet, when she saw them come, the men with their machines, a strange peace settled over her. There would be houses. Houses meant people to live in them, laugh and cry and die in them. New memories would be made in this place. New families would come and go and live and die and leave their legacies behind in this place, just as hers had. The tree was the medium of memories that would die with her, but the world would not end with her death. This land would remain long after she had passed on. Though the tree meant nothing to others, this place of hers, her home, would not go unloved for long. She realized then that just as it was love that made this place special to her, she could be consoled of its loss as long as love and a sense of home grew here.

The garish hum of the spinning blades broke the little old woman from her reverie and she watched as the highest branches of the tree, which she had so often been dared to reach, began to fall away. Her beautiful tree was slowly taken apart before her eyes, like a piece of furniture that is packed into boxes and shipped off, systematic and final. Part of her died with it. When it was done, she looked down at her knitting. A bright little pink baby’s sock had found its shape in her hands and she slowly tied it off. She laboriously stood and walked into the house for more yarn, knowing that she could would return to watch the men finish their work. The old rocking chair swayed slowly back and forth in her wake, creaking, as the back door swung shut behind her.