Being

Humans can't remember being born. I hear the great majority of them can't remember being saplings, let alone seedlings, of course I've been told they call them "infants" and "children." I have only glimpsed infants on rare occasions. The children come here often. I like the sound of them, and the scent of them, sticky, sweet, with salty skin, not yet musky like their forebearers.

As I said, humans can't remember their most fragile and helpless of states, and I suppose that is a kindness, in a way, but I remember my birth and it is a cherished memory.

I remember becoming conscious, there in my samara, I was told by an oak that it had lain under descarded leaves all winter in the cold. My first sensations were ones of warmth and comfort, like being full from a meal and full of energy. I remember the membranes of my lower portions bursting first, and my roots trickling into the warm spring soil, reaching and grasping, then I traveled upwards, out of the soil. my first few leaflets emerged on the edge of the meadow, with my grove at my back, supporting me from the winds. As my leaflets unfurled I gasped my first breaths and tasted the brilliant sun.

I have always taken an unhealthy interest in humans. I find them fascinating. Aspen said that was the first sign. Aspen likes to antagonize me, it doesn't bother me at all, as everyone knows that Aspen doesn't belong here. Her kind are from far North, and if the grove can accept her than they can learn to love me. We are quite a lot alike, only in that we are both different.

When I tease her about being the first of her kind in our grove, she turns her leaves away from me to show the white undersides. Sometimes I go too far and she shudders with greif.

I am often not proud of my pettier impulses.

I first saw an infant when I was a sappling. My trunk must have been only a few human fingers wide, and I had seen 3 or four winters, I can't recall for certain. My interest the stragest of fauna had already become apparent, and I had gathered as much information as such a young one could about the humans.

It was winter. The winter had not been particularly cold, infact it was unseasonably warm. Winter, undoubtedly in that the flora remain in our slumber and it had been wet and dark, but no icy winds tearing the bark from our cambium.

That is why I was first shocked to sense a young female crossing the grasses to us in tears holding such a limp bundle in her arms. I do not know my mother tree. I was carried on the wind here. Sapplings are supported by the community their births and losses are celebrated by all. Somehow I understood that this bundle was the woman's seedling. It was so hot. Too hot. I could smell its cells struggling and bursting under the heat.

It was then that I first experienced a sensation no other flora reports to have experienced in such intentsity. I have come to learn that fauna call this senstion sight. We can experience a muted form through lur connection with them. I cannot explain how it is the I experienced such clear sight this day, as when I am a tree, I have no eyes.

I looked on this little one with as much wonder as curiosity. I knew so little of the human tongue, but the woman was chanting and weeping. She was speaking to me, begging me for something. I could not understand why. She stroking my bare branches gently as her child lay limp at my roots. I looked upon the child wrapped in a yellow blanket of sheeps wool, with it's limbs hanging free, so fat and pink and smelling of imminent decay.

I felt something from her finger tips, there upon my bark. I felt such a love, such a yearning, that could not be ignored. It was as bright and warm as any light I have tasted. It moved me, I accepted any request being made. I wanted this small human to cool, just take the chill of the hard earth gradually into its bones, while earth mother took this heat and this pestilence into her. I begged for her to heal this child as earnestly as the woman begged before me.

The little one's breath became deeper, and it's eyes, which had been wildy rolled upward into its own skull, began to focus, the baby whimpered. The mother cried out in joy and placed the baby to her breast, and the child began to extract nurioushment from her enthusiastically.

Later I was told that many babies from the village were lost that year and layed to rest at the other side of the meadow. Willows and Yarrows lended their aid to the wise women as much as they could but the pestilence had proven too much. But not my baby. MY baby lived.