Yesterday, contractors for the power company cut down a twenty-some-foot ponderosa pine growing under the powerline festooned across a section of my property. After the workers rumbled off in their oversized trucks, I walked down to the now empty place where the tree once stood.
In a sense, a living tree harbors the
ghost of itself inside. The inner rings of growth—the heartwood—are actually
dead. They no longer carry water or nutrients. The true life of the tree
happens just beneath the bark, in the narrow outermost layers, which are
shockingly thin. Each year, a new layer forms and swells, then surrenders to
the next.
I thought about this as I studied the
stump and a half-dozen lengths of trunk scattered alongside. I suppose we are
the same as a tree in some manner. We, too, grow on thin layers of today, while
inside us we carry a host of rigid memories and experiences—the ghosts of our
growth. They both support us and confine us to who we are.
—Mitchell Hegman
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