/lit/ - Literature

>>10791542
I remember how I learned the nature of Beach leaves, going for walks with my father through those grey New England winters. For three years from November until March, the world seemed especially colorless. He would drag me outside into the cold for my own good, out of love. My legs had stopped listening to me. I fell forwards through the sleeping forests, an infant atop stilts, tumbling down the icy rooted paths towards the water. My thoughts were not my own. My body; burning, crooked, and crumbling, no longer heard my voice.

What makes the North American Beech Tree so distinct is that it hails from the tropics. Long ago these giants wandered into a foreign land, gradually northwards from warmer climes. Lost in the snow, they were forced to leave their authentic selves behind; to adapt, to survive. Unlike the maple or oak with their dark skins and jagged ridges the Beech is smooth, flat, and light. Here in the north, the Beech stands out. Ever a stranger, there is no one in the landscape quite like it.

I had learned from books that the purpose of this adaptation is to distribute solar heat evenly, to prevent deadly frost cracks from forming in the bark; but I believe differently. I believe, the Beech looks this way because deep in its sturdy trunk, it remembers. As it sleeps under the low New England winter sun, that lazy egg yolk, dripping in the sky, it dreams of home.

The Beech comes from a land where there is no winter, where the leaves may live year round without a care in the world. In that place of memory they always full, they are always green. No such thing exists up here in New England; not for these giants, so stranded in the cold. No, their leaves shrivel into pale white nothings.

Turned downwards on their stems like scraps of paper quaking in the wind, they are a sore sight indeed. However fragile, the Beech leaf holds a quiet strength. It never lets go. It holds on because in the tropics, because in spring, the leaves do not let go. It refuses to die because it remembers what once was, because it knows what again will be.

I remember being in withdrawal; what it meant to be paper thin, to flail in the wind, to hang pale above the icy ground. I remember how I learned the nature of Beech leaves, and what they whispered through the forest that would set me free.