Many humans visit my point on the edge of Lake Crescent at the mouth of Barnes Creek, which flows more like a river, I think. They pose for cameras, throw rocks across the water’s calming surface as the sun begins to set behind what’s called Aurora Ridge. Sometimes they sit, lean against me, or the little ones hang from my lower limbs. But there is one, a woman comparable to my age in human years, who presses one foot against an offshoot at my base and carefully lifts herself to perch on my level branch. She rubs the ribs of my wrinkled bark, picks at my lichen, and pats me with her hand, her love. I can feel it, you know, the light releasing into my marrow. I think we share a beginning story. I feel the water in her well, we all carry similar ruminating material in our cells. We share golden moments in sun’s setting warmth until the ball of flame hides behind the range. One day, she spots one carving in particular, humans like to knife their marks, make me weep until I slowly scab. She traces a finger over the letters a man and woman created together. She whispers, ‘I’m sorry that they’ve done this to you.’ I’ve healed those cuts yet her words soothe something deep, which speaks of human loss that’s rubbed off on me, like the lichen. Later, one of the couple returns and notches these numbers next to their lines: ’81-’23. I can’t wait to show the woman. Sure enough, she notices, and I feel her joy dim. She says, ‘It has ended, a life or a marriage perhaps.’ She hugs herself closer to my trunk. We weep together for the couple, for loss, for time passing. We cry into the growing dark and cold. We hold the water and scars of one another.
Merit Prize Winning Poem, Stories That Need to be Told (TulipTree Publishing, 2024).
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Laura E. Garrard is a cancer thriver and CranioSacral Therapist living on the Northwest Peninsula. Her poetry and prose appear in journals like Bellevue Literary Review, Amethyst Review, The Madrona Project, Silver Birch, and TulipTree Review, which recently awarded her a Merit Prize. She writes a cancer poetry series, Poetry That Fits, on Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org. Garrard is a citizen scientist at the Feiro Marine Life Center, where she helps monitor phytoplankton for SoundToxins.
