Rubber can only be tapped in chambered, sunless hours. Each day, the lumina of rubber trees are dried hollow, leaving a resinous haunting that is rinsed away with the sap of the next circadian rhythm. The time-consciousness of trees extends from days to years in the markings of the cambium. Cell division halts each winter and the growth rings become still. From childhood we count the years on these wooden clock faces, understanding that memory and age swell not forwards, but outwards, as ink in water.
Trees born in wind tunnels grow backwards in retreat. Having hammered through the timber frame, the wind prises between rings and warps the yearly etching: the page is tilted and the ink runs. Thrown out of orbit, the tree recalibrates its past to the demands of an external force.
In this way, the impression of a year in wood is distorted by the trauma of far off hills, by the air’s conflicting memory of a pressure-front collapsing downriver. People too can be weathered relentlessly into forgetfulness. The rings bleed and four months become one. The forest is a bath in collective misrecall, a green, ultrasonic scream of homecoming and a summer that bled till May.
anemoia
1. (neologism, rare) Nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.
Constructed from Ancient Greek ἄνεμος (ánemos, “wind”) + νόος (nóos, “mind”), with reference to anemosis, the warping of a tree by high wind "until it seems to bend backward."
Very good, in the opinion of a weathered mind. Obviously written by a rubber planters great niece.