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My husband loved yarns—Mark Twain’s, Abe Lincoln’s, and his own. His story-telling timing was perfect. As dementia began to play with his brain, his fish grew bigger. At first, I thought it was loving and responsible (after his audience had gone home) to cut his fish down to size and keep him in reality. He’d laugh and brush me off, saying, “You know I’m a story teller. I don’t exaggerate; I embellish.” Eventually, enjoying his tales, I stopped lobbying for accuracy and he came to believe his own stories.

That’s memory. At times it’s  trustworthy, at other times, not. Mine used to be a steel trap. Now I’m seeing spongy places, leaks, and, more happily, places where the steel has been bent and twisted into lovely sculptural forms. The facts I caught so long ago remain the same— but truer understanding and compassion have replaced pain, judgments, blame, confusion or my own distortions.

We humans are bent toward putting our own spin on our traumas and delights— as well as on our hunting and fishing yarns. My scant reading on plant memory suggests that it’s more direct, less guileless than human recall. How complex is it? Knowing that plants respond positively and negatively to music and sound, what effect, if any, might our human turmoil may leave upon them?

Was the sense of  fear I felt traveling by train through Russian forests emanating from the trees, like it seemed to be, or did it come from the air or my own imagination? What about the the haunting of my friend’s Georgia woods? Did the trees  respond to the cannon blasts, the gunshots and cries of wounded soldiers during the Civil War? (See Tree No. 81, “Where Blood was Shed.” Did the trees at Gethsemane react in any way to Jesus’ presence, to His suffering in the garden? Does my poem, “Silent Witness” exaggerate a truth? Embellish it? Imagine? Or state a living reality?

Silent Witness

Gethsemane’s for tourists now.
Gates and barriers separate me
From the gnarled trees,
Their memories trapped in sap long dried.

Fences forbid the ache to touch.
To pass my hand into the heartwood,
To draw enduring witness
Out from yester year to now.

It was a horrible night.
Halloween, late-night spook shows,
Pogroms, massacres, living skeletons,
Unholy secrets breathing
From the source of time
Burst with a blackness of hate
Upon a lonely man,
Already wrenched by betrayal.

But He held on to life
With hope and faith and love
Enough to water the earth,
With His blood, enough to feed the trees
And change the desecration of His body
Into Holy Sacrifice.

Give Gethsemane’s strength to me.
The gnarled trees, still alive,
Their memories trapped in sap long dried,
Will testify that death has died.

Ginny Emery, from Places ©2011

 

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• Trees