Chapter 19: The Trees That Remember

 

People ask me what I miss most about Earth.

They expect me to say the oceans.

Or rain.

Or the blue sky.

Sometimes I surprise them.

"I miss trees."

Not forests.

Not timber.

Trees.

Individual lives standing patiently in the same place for decades, sometimes centuries, asking for nothing except light.

Mars has many remarkable things.

Ancient volcanoes taller than Olympus.

Canyons so vast they could swallow nations.

Dust storms that wrap themselves around an entire planet.

But it has never known the sound of leaves.

Back on Earth, every tree carried its own personality.

The olive tree was a philosopher.

Twisted by centuries of wind, it never hurried.

Its roots held conversations with stones older than empires.

It taught us that strength does not always grow upward.

Sometimes it grows deeper.

The plane tree was a storyteller.

Its broad branches gathered generations beneath their shade.

Old men played tavli.

Children invented kingdoms.

Travelers rested without asking permission.

Every village had one.

Every memory seemed to begin beneath one.

The pine was the guardian of the sea.

I remember the forests of Halkidiki, where resin scented the summer air and the trunks leaned toward the water as if listening to the waves.

Even now, when I close my eyes inside the colony, I can almost smell warm pine needles after the sun has baked them all afternoon.

The beech belonged to the mountains.

In autumn its leaves became quiet flames.

In winter it stood without complaint.

It knew that losing everything for a season did not mean life had ended.

The fir watched over Pindus.

Straight.

Silent.

Dignified.

When the wind crossed the ridges, the forests answered together like an unseen choir.

My grandmother Cornelia never spoke of trees as objects.

She greeted them.

She thanked the walnut tree before gathering its fruit.

She touched the fig tree before pruning its branches.

She believed that every tree remembered the hands that cared for it.

As a child, I smiled at her words.

Now, living on a planet where nothing grows without permission, I wonder if she understood something science has not yet measured.

Perhaps memory is not only stored in brains.

Perhaps it lingers in roots.

In rings hidden beneath bark.

In seeds waiting patiently beneath snow.

The old Vlach shepherds used to say that a lonely oak should never be cut down.

It was believed to shelter the invisible travelers of the mountains.

Whether spirits, angels, or forgotten memories, no one could say.

So the oak remained.

Not because people were afraid.

Because they respected mystery.

We have become very good at explaining the world.

Sometimes too good.

We measure forests in cubic meters.

We calculate carbon.

We classify species.

Useful things.

Necessary things.

Yet somewhere along the way, we stopped introducing ourselves to trees.

On Mars, I planted the first sapling in a sealed greenhouse.

It was only twenty centimeters tall.

A young oak.

Its leaves trembled beneath recycled air.

No birds came to rest upon its branches.

No insects crawled across its bark.

No child carved initials into its trunk.

Still...

it reached toward the light.

Exactly as every tree before it had done for hundreds of millions of years.

I placed my hand gently against its slender stem.

For a moment, I forgot I was on Mars.

I was back in Greece.

Walking beneath the chestnuts of Mount Vermio.

Listening to the beeches of Pindus.

Breathing the pines of Vourvourou.

Resting beneath an old plane tree that had shaded strangers long before my grandparents were born.

Perhaps that is why trees feel immortal.

Not because they never die.

But because they spend their entire lives teaching others how to remain.

Before leaving the greenhouse, I whispered the words my grandmother always spoke after planting something new.

"Grow slowly.

The Earth has never hurried.

Neither should you."

And somewhere beyond the glass dome,

beneath the silent red sky of Mars,

I imagined every forest I had ever loved

still waiting,

patiently,

for me to come home.

...to be continued...