A Hundred Years

Standing

This is an original voiceover, recorded by an actual human (me). You may hear pauses, breath, or the occasional scratchy sound, but I hope it makes the piece more accessible.

I’ve read that some souls are not born again, not straight away.

Those who have suffered too much return as trees.

For one hundred years, they are asked for nothing. They don’t have to explain what happened. They don’t have to forgive anyone.

They’re given roots.

My bubbie told me this beneath the beech at the end of her garden. I was seven and had already learned that adults could say a thing was over while still carrying that thing into every room.

“What happens when the hundred years are finished?” I asked in absolute earnest.

“The tree falls,” she said. “Then the soul is ready for the next thing.”

The beech had stood there longer than the house. Its roots pushed through the soil like the backs of old hands. One branch had grown so low that I could sit astride it, though my bubbie always told me not to pull at the leaves.

“She needs them,” she said.

I believed the tree was a woman. Not anyone I personally knew. Someone who had spent one life frightened of footsteps, or starving, or trying to keep the kids quiet. Someone who had died tired.

So I sat with her.

I told her things I could not tell my mother. I pressed my cheek to her bark and felt nothing move beneath it. That was the real comfort. She didn’t need to answer.

Years passed. My bubbie died. The house was sold, then sold again, but the tree remained.

I was sixty when I heard it had fallen during a bad storm.

I drove there and found her stretched across the grass, wider on the ground than she’d ever seemed standing. The trunk had split cleanly near the roots. There was not an iota of rot inside her.

I rested my hand against her pale wood.

For one hundred years, maybe more, she had held her place. Birds had nested in her. Children had climbed her. People had taken shelter beneath her without knowing they were resting against someone who had once needed shelter herself.

I hoped she hadn’t minded; I hoped this life had been quiet enough.

And then I left her there, ready to be born.

If you need a bit of soothing, the video below offers a quiet moment of beech trees moving in the soft summer light.