By Zeynep Özer
Winner of The Edwin Way Teale Award for Nature Writing
1
There is a tree on my way home. It’s planted towards the middle of the sidewalk. The road, otherwise pedestrian, makes a sharp curve around it so that one would have to change their course significantly to move past it. This is a welcome change of course, though: the home stretch.
At night, that stretch is buried in the dark. From a distance, only the tree stands visible, a silhouette, collecting in its gut all the light cast from the solitary lamppost behind it. And yet, it is not a jealous hoarder of radiance. I knew this the moment I stepped past it in our first nocturnal meeting, when it spilled all the artificial glow it was holding onto my path.
On that well-lit path, now I travel to all the homes I have, near and far, one in Connecticut and a couple in Turkey.
On that path, the tree and I see each other frequently. Yet I don’t know what kind of tree it is. A mighty tree, for sure. One I imagine becoming so intimate with that I can recognize every twig, every new spot of lichen, that I can visualize the hunches of the valleys engraved into its bark when I’m lying in bed. Such an intimacy would allow me to grasp the lightness in its characteristic solemnity, the carefree resilience in the way it bursts from the ground, sprouting its arms in every direction.
Am I just projecting, or do I sense joy in that burst? It is difficult to be huggable and solemn at the same time. I do neither very well.
2
I would have loved to live an arboreal life. To have a sense of purpose ingrained in my DNA, my complex systems in constant natural labor for myself and for others. Perhaps to stand as a rare tree, still a minority, in my first home Ankara, in that forest of people. Or, to become one of so many in Connecticut’s woodlands where each tree seems capable of claiming its own space. Seems.
I’m not a tree; I’m human, looking up to trees, struggling to meet their gaze. In vain. Trees don’t gaze. Their typical state is to be. And I think they are by organically taking in everything, with every part of their being, to brew and re-present back to life. To inhale, to exhale, to reset.
3
My blinds are open, and I look through my large windows. Unlike the narrow high window facing the back, these line the length of my room and allow me to take in the yard between the apartment complexes and the woods starting right at the perimeter. The sky is ice-blue. Against it, in the steely radiant sunshine, crystalized branches exert themselves violently to reach ecstasy. Dervishes of the natural order, they rock back and forth convulsively, chant in tune with the wind, and surrender their beings to its annihilating power. They whirl and spread chaos: ice hails not from the skies now but from the entranced branches. This is not an ice storm, nor freezing rain. It’s something else entirely, and it must have a name. In New England, it cannot be a rare occurrence that trees stand together in meditation and in motion, turn and swirl in synchrony, and shake off the glazed frost, residue of a silver storm, to return to their iceless limbs. So, it must have a name. In fact, it must have been named by a mighty sorcerer of winter like the old world’s Norse Jack Frost, Slavic Ded Moroz, Tatar Qış Babay, or Yakut Yamal Iri. In the new world, it must have been a hoar and relentless spirit that still appears every now and then in icy rage which cuts through the air and shoots into exposed surfaces, earth or flesh. I don’t know the name, but I know better now.
4
I hear turbulence outside. I realize it is the menacing hum of bare trees playing with the currents trapped between their close-ranked branches. Slowly but surely they vibrate. You would expect these leafless limbs to become a choir of scraping noises, but they only utter a melancholy thrum while rocking left and right. I now know what wuthering sounds like. It is subduing and alarming. It always feels like something uncanny is approaching. Now it’s inching towards you, now it’s dangerously close, and now you realize you are on the brink of a void, about to be sucked into nothingness. You never do, though. You are safely tucked in your bed, looking through the high window that frames a cluster of knotty branches painted onto the pale blue sky.
5
It snowed again last night. The trees that I could see from my window had put on snowscales. The bark’s cragginess, courtesy of the lichens, offered enough surface for the flakes to hold onto. As a result, the internal light that usually emits pale grey green and pale yellow green waves scintillated (so many words for shine!) in silver. Not in slate (a dark shade of grey with earthy undertones) even though it certainly has earth below its toned trunk.
I wish I’d travelled to my tree on the way home, to see it in its argentine glory. Now that it’s raining, I can only imagine it. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing: filling the pieces my eye for the real skipped, substituting my projections with the real fantasy.
6
I am half sure that the woods stretching beyond my apartment are slowly and slyly trying to rise
and leave.
How else can I explain the deep toneless growl that travels in waves and echoes
in my chest cavity?
It’s not hard to imagine they’ll leave behind a depression.
There are few leaves left.
Is this what an earthquake sounds like?
7
These days, my thoughts are like the leaves, few and scattered. A cursory Google search suggests I use “debris” to describe this unconcentrated state and I resent the word for how fitting it is: nothing but remains and fragments.
Well, I suppose that is what an earth-shattering quake does. It shatters your time into a million pieces. If you are a survivor, I imagine that all pieces are about and an extension of the quake. If you are a helpless observer, some pieces still precariously hinge onto your life-from-before, often about to be cut loose by shards of the earthquake.
How? A purely physical event, the earth tossing and turning in its bed to settle. Yet it reaches to people thousands of kilometers away, emotionally, mentally. It becomes an abstract concept. Unless you are there, of course. At the heart of it all where your cells vibrate with every tremor. Repeatedly, aftershock after shock. Where you are crushed under rubble and loss. Where everything is very much concrete and lost.
8
Spring, how do you do it? Afterrain smells different all of a sudden. Is it because rain drops can now rub on a thousand different efflorescent leaves?
Ah… English words… How is efflorescent connected to “florescent”? And how apt that this word for light echoes “fluorescent,” the word for growing: the reappearance of leaves is going to be an unmissable event, bright and glowing, generous and welcoming.
I gladly receive on each of my sensory receptors the aromatic, cheeky freshness of spring’s afterrains. Like the relief after a good, long, wholehearted cry that does not lift the burden but plays with its genetic makeup.
Hormonally charged drops of saline can do wonders to form a new, digestible, bearable compound that could be carried with the ease a brown bear would carry a single silver trout, a compound of sadness and, at the end, a recurring melancholy for the fine sob.
Spring, how do you do it? I’m drained; I feel my vessels shrinking – from life. I’m not ready to conduct the frog choir that inhabits the nearby reed bed. They know. When I approach, I can hear a defeated last leaf from last fall fall gently onto the slowly greening surface of the pond, but nothing of the disharmonious croaks’ incessant yet hesitant attempts at different tunes.
Spring, I might need your rains more than I realized. I should be soaked in your joyful pitter-patter to dilute the heap of salt I ingested hint by hint into my body (a desperate attempt to accumulate as much as I can, box after box, the subtle taste of whole grain wheat crackers made with just a hint of sea salt, for “a low sodium choice!”). I’m only dehydrated, not entirely denuded of my sap, probably. I should cleanse my mind with your calming monotonous springlets coming down from the clouds to erase the afterimages the backlit screens smeared on my psyche. I’ve only overloaded my psyche, not completely overwhelmed it, probably.
9
Am I allergic to Connecticut?
10
It’s fine when I’m sad and the grey skies split to make way for a defeating downpour. I find it more difficult to cope with sadness when it’s sunny outside and melting snow reveals patches of soil ready for green. At those times, I don’t know what to do with myself: how can you resist the sunlight even when your eyelids are brought down heavy with the unbearable brightness?
Two nights ago, the sky fluoresced with a silver glare. It had snowed earlier and, this time, I went out. The grounds were covered in silent white which defiantly reflected itself onto the midnight blue canvas above. I’ve never seen the grounds in the sky before — not where I come from, where the night sky is always a dejected black and the city lights devour the starlight.
11
I fear my head might explode. I feel an unbearable atmospheric pressure in my inner ear. It’s as if the malleus, the incus, and the stapes have become motive and literal: the hammering on the anvil held on by the stirrups is immensely loud, indefatigably constant, and artlessly subtle. A pandemonium in the labyrinths of my ear, a tempest in my skull. My body is throbbing all over. Is this the revenge of the trees? Are they not uncaring? That, I learn, is a dangerous assumption. They care for that which nourishes them, and it’s for these the tree’s nourishing gestures are meant. When the opportunity presents itself, equipped with the atmospheric pressure, their solid, unmoving exasperation sublimates into an abasing wrath that might just trickle into ear canals: I was in the line of fire, I have a headache.
12
It is so hard to move with purpose.
13
It must be the leaves! I no longer hear the aching jinks of wind as it darts from naked tree to naked tree. There is now a deep sigh that rises from the belly of the forest. It is incremental and captivating. When I listen, I can picture it effortfully yet lightly climb up the throat of the hibernating beast. Soon I will be delightfully confused and won’t be able to tell if it’s raining or just breezy without looking out of the window.
There are already more bodies, warm bodies, around. I can feel the temperature rising. Yes, it is mainly because the earth is (constantly) moving, but also because life now claims more space than death.
14
The tree is truly on the way home. As my days in Connecticut dwindle, the tree has grown to mirror me — or, rather, I the tree. Me and the tree, we are from the same story. We have been waiting for a joyful conclusion to the chapter — the return home and the return of spring — but the closer we come, the more we stall. The other trees carry bucketsful of reddish pollen on their branches, inevitably spilling some. My tree’s branches, on the other hand, are merely speckled with shy red blemishes. I want to shake the tree and say, “It’s okay.” “This you have accomplished before, you can do it once more and twice, thrice more. You have all the springs; embrace them.” I don’t say anything.