Where we used to place our hands for support, the wood has grown soft and crumbled, each brush of a hand eroding deeper and deeper. The branches are looking ever more fragile. Leaves are growing sparse, fewer returning each spring.
It's a paradox, how as things grow older they grow closer to death, and yet we take their existence so much for granted. When we built that treehouse in the limb that fell last summer, it wasn't supposed to be temporal. Or at the least, it was supposed to become a memento, its weathered planks growing to match its host in dignity. But the three winters it saw weren't even enough to grey the wood.
Yes, all trees will die eventually, but not this one in particular. Not so soon. It must have been hundreds of years, since before the roads and houses were there to be escaped. Back when this damp, green quietude was expected. When other giants loomed in the canopy above.
No one was here to see it be born. And if they had been, would they have noticed? It was just another shoot back then, like the dozens around its roots now. How many of those will grow to stand so tall and broad, with the rest of the forest keeping a respectful distance? How many will even grow tall enough to climb?
The tree is rotting.
How long will passers-by see the spectacle of death just now beginning? It can't last forever, but it must be years at least before the mass of its body can be absorbed. The two of us together can hardly stretch our arms around it, after all. How long until those final rings in its center, the ones that have been hidden away for centuries, finally see the air in a last dying moment?
The corpses of its relatives are lying around us. Slowly reentering the ground, but for now out in the open. Not empty shells to be hidden away, but meaningful, beautiful things passing on to another stage of being.
They will leave no skeletons.
I just realized I have no concept at all how trees die naturally, without being chopped or burned down. Do trees die of old age? Apparently not, but the different experiences of stress overtime accumulate and lead to death. Immortal but not.
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