Silent Witness - The View From A Tree

This story is dedicated to Lesley O, and also to anybody who has ever hugged a tree.

The idea first seeded itself during a Sunday morning walk through Astley Park, long before COVID. A passing conversation about what the aged trees must have witnessed during their long years sparked my imagination, and I remember saying, half jokingly, that one day I would write a story told by a tree. Lesley, probably won’t even remember that conversation - she was politely bemused by my ramblings at the time (and also in mild shock after a rogue swan chased us away from it's nest).

With the environment being such a concern and the value of life, in any form, seeming so cheap, I wanted this piece to be "of its time" and to reflect the world as I see it today.

So, with ideas from The Secret Lives of Trees, the quote which follows by Cristen Rodgers and the influences of countless magical trees from childhood, what follows is, in a small way, a completion of that conversation.

"Listen closely. Even the trees exhale sweet love songs that roll off their boughs and echo out to all of creation. Love is always in the air." Cristen Rodgers

SILENT WITNESS - THE VIEW FROM A TREE 

As the hands on the town hall clock click to midnight, the large bronze bell tolls loudly, welcoming in another year. I stand, like Janus, looking back to the past and forward to the new year to come. I am alone. A solitary yew tree, looking out across the wide green lawns that have been my home for more winters than I can recall.  Frost clings to my lower branches, sparkling in the bright silvery light of a wolf moon. Round and full in a January sky, it's reflection bounces up from the thin sheen of ice covering a nearby pond and a mystical mist hovers above the surface. The air is crisp, it carries the faint smell of smoke from a nearby chimney and the pungent smokey odour of the fireworks that now fill the sky. I feel the fear from the fox foraging at my roots as, startled, it runs from the crackles and bangs overhead. 

The year is 2025. My trunk still holds me upright, but is gnarled and furrowed like the face of an ancient watcher who has weathered too many winters. My limbs bend under the weight of the snow, shoulders stooped with age. It is in the summer that I am most alive, I am a home to birds, a perch for squirrels, I bare leaves that shelter and feed. Beneath the soil, my roots spread far and wide. They are my lifeline. They bring me food and messages from the ground. I feel the hum of life around me: moles tunnelling silently, beetles scuttling along hidden pathways, a hedgehog nestled in the roots. I am proud, but I am weary.

I have stood in this place for more years than I can count. Planted near Cotton Mills at the time of the Panic, I have watched cloth merchants sell their wares, lamplighters illuminate the cobbles at night, families stroll by in their Sunday best. I have seen children run and laugh as they played with hoops, flew kites or kicked balls. I have felt the rumble of horses pulling carriages and the first vibrations of motorcars. I've watched war planes carve smoke trails through the sky, felt the earth explode under bombs, and lost limbs in lightning strikes. I've witnessed lovers embrace and children play at my feet, leaving forgotten toys in my roots. I am eternal, or I once believed I was.

But eternity is an illusion - a trickster - it is Loki! Now, a single white 'X' marks my trunk, a death sentence sprayed by human hands. My fibrous roots hear the hushed underground chatter and I know that my time is short. Soon, a house will stand where I have lived, not for birds or squirrels or owls or for woodpeckers, but for humans. Humans, who do not feel the scurrying below, who do not care about the life they displace. Humans who do not nurture the soil but who poison it.

I see the irony. Once I offered shade, a perch, sustenance for creatures that depended on me. Now I am overlooked, I am an inconvenience tagged for removal. Time has made me valuable in ways only a few notice, yet those who judge usefulness do not see beyond their immediate gain. They do not notice the soil I feed, the air I clean, the shade that I provide. They can't see that these are gifts which sustain all life and I am ignored.

And yet, not all have forgotten. I have seen the couple who first met beneath my boughs decades ago. Whose youthful skin has wrinkled and whose shoulders too are bowed. Their frail hands trace the initials they carved a lifetime ago, they remember and they grieve for me. They have walked these lawns through countless seasons, their children and their grandchildren have played in my branches, and now they mourn at the thought of my loss. I sense their grief like a gentle kiss on my bark and I am comforted. I sense, also, the fragility in their steps, their own quiet acknowledgment that each breath is a gift that may not last until spring.

And so I wait. Stooped and scarred, a silent witness to the lives unfolding. A single tiny flower falls, trembling in the icy air, and I feel the echo of a child’s laughter from decades past, the faint warmth of lovers’ embraces still lingering in my bark, and shadows stretching long across the frozen lawns, which carry memories that will fade but never quite vanish. The world falls silent.

Dawn breaks. The 1st of January 2025 has  arrived, cold and bright. Families bundled up in winter woollies begin to filter in through the park gates, their feet crunching on the icy ground.  Dogs bound joyfully through the grass chasing balls or picking up discarded sticks. Children laugh and play noisily as their parents watch on. The park is alive once more and I feel my mood change as I feed on the energy that now surrounds me. I am Yew! I have stood where others have fallen. When age bends me, I return from within. When branches break, shoots rise. I endure.

The elderly couple has returned, their grandchildren at their side. Small hands gather the berries and leaves which I have shed into the frost, each child cradles a seed of my memory. Their voices seem soft, determined somehow, and I understand. They will carry me forward. Perhaps a house will rise where I have stood, walls may stand where once my branches reached, but in gardens, churchyards, and wild corners of the earth, I will take root again.

And, although nobody will see me here, I will remain. My roots will move beneath the dirt, my children will break through the earth and live in a garden as I have done. My magical song will not be lost, it will echo in the veins of my saplings, in the breath of the wind and, in the song of nesting birds, I will endure! I am eternal!