looking out from my bedroom at the lone white birch in the front field, I notice a few suckers coming up, sprouting impetuously from the rootstock that I’ll need to cut back, the paper birch, paper because of the nature of its bark, thin, flexibrittled and layered loosely against the trunk, is bent over, this happened with last winter’s storm, snow and ice and wind weighed and pressured down the tree until the top bent over enough to kiss the ground, an imperfect upside-down U, how surprising that must have been, the treetop accustomed to reaching ever upward, then, like its roots, intimately knowing the ground it sprouted from, the ability of the birch to arch, bark peeling in places, pink and mottled white paper streaked with lenticels, and now we are in the warmer months, the treetop has forsaken the ground and is straightening slowly, a number of sunny days, dawn to dusk full sun, will draw the top back up to the sky, the dimming memory of the dirt in its mouth not allowing a full leveling but eventually a gesture to the sun, this one white birch can’t be missed, the only tree in a field of dandelions, grass and clover, a good twenty feet from the forest’s edge, it represents in this field a hermiting supple presence, its soft solitude in the stillness of the day demands to be seen and respected, its davening in windstorms venerated, as the sunfilled days go by and the birch slowly reaches upward I wonder if that dirttouched memory fades, many objects, living or inanimate are attributed with powers of recollection like the curious bottle of homeopathic dilution, certainly too much is being expected of every molecule, I don’t believe that every experience, sensation, event is permanently coded within us simply waiting for the right moment, no matter the passing of time, for our present to connect with our past, we are too obsessed with constantly recreating new experiences, sensations, events to spend energy of any significance to wholesale storage of our detailed past, I reject this notion, this idea, this accursed nostalgia, an avalanche, Blanchot called it, the world of the future falling on the memory of the past, I will not succumb, the tree reaches up toward the sun because that is what a tree does

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Michael L Sevy is a writer and composer from Vermont. His work has been published in 3:AM Magazine and minor literature[s]. He was the leader of punk bands Cold Dogs in the Courtyard and Bonus Marchers. You can find him on twitter at @MichaelSevy and bsky at @mlsevy.bsky.social.