Letters to the Trees

I used to think the trees were silent. That they stood still, indifferent, their branches bare witnesses to our tiny lives. I know better now. Now, I know they listen. Maybe that’s why I started writing the letters to give my secrets a place to grow roots when my heart could not hold them anymore.

It began on a November afternoon, the air sharp with the scent of wet soil and distant fires. I found myself wandering to the old oak at the far edge of the field behind my childhood home the same tree where I used to hide my report cards and unfinished poems as a boy, convinced that its broad trunk could protect my failures from the world.

I carried with me a letter. Just one, at first. Folded and creased from too many second thoughts. It was for my mother gone now, five winters past. I don’t remember what I wrote exactly. Only that my hands trembled as I dug a small hollow among the roots and laid the paper inside as gently as if I were burying a bird.

The wind rustled the branches overhead, and for a heartbeat I thought I heard her voice, warm and distant, like a lullaby caught between the leaves. Maybe it was just my mind making music out of the hush. Or maybe it was the tree listening — and answering.

So I wrote another.

The next letter was for Thomas — the friend I lost when life pulled our feet in different directions. We were twelve when we swore we’d never drift apart. At thirty-two, I couldn’t even remember the sound of his laugh. I wrote about the nights we spent catching fireflies in glass jars and setting them loose like stars we could touch. I asked if he ever thought of me the way I thought of him when the streetlights flickered on. I signed it Yours always, the boy with mud on his knees.

I buried it beneath the oak, next to my mother’s letter.

Then came letters for my father, who never quite learned how to stay. For the girl I kissed once under a yellow moon and never found again. For the child I hope to meet someday I told them about the world I wish for them: softer, kinder, a place where secrets don’t weigh so heavy.

Each letter carried a piece of me that words spoken aloud could not free. Each time I pressed a folded page into the earth, the tree seemed to lean closer, its canopy sighing in the language only roots and wind and old bark understand.

In winter, when the branches stood naked against the grey sky, I worried the tree would forget me that the cold would swallow my whispers. But still I came, mittens damp with snow, breath fogging the air as I pressed new words into the frozen ground. I told the tree about the promotion I didn’t get, about the empty seat at the Christmas table, about the way I sometimes feared I’d vanish without a trace if no one was left to say my name.

Spring always brought an answer. Buds would appear like tiny promises, and the breeze would carry the scent of damp earth and wildflowers. I liked to imagine the tree spoke back then in green murmurs and pollen dust. I’d lie on my back beneath its arms, eyes closed, listening to the hush of new leaves, pretending each rustle was a reply: You are here. I remember.

Years passed this way. Words written, buried, absorbed by roots older than any sorrow I could carry alone. Some nights, when the moon was a sliver of bone above the field, I’d feel foolish a grown man hiding secrets under a tree like a child with a shoebox of treasures. But when I looked at the oak, rough bark lit silver by moonlight, I knew my letters made it mine and me its own.

I wonder, sometimes, what the earth does with my words. Do the worms read them? Do the roots twist them into the water underground, sending them out to every leaf and bud? Do the birds perch on the branches and listen for the stories hidden beneath their feet?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s enough that the act of telling turned the silence into something alive. That the tree, ancient and patient, reminds me that what we bury is never truly gone it grows, it breathes, it becomes something else.

Someday, when I am gone, I hope someone finds the letters. I hope they kneel at the foot of the old oak, brush away the moss and soil, unfold the pages yellowed with time. Maybe they’ll read my secrets out loud, and the tree will remember my voice in its rings. Or maybe they’ll write their own new words, new roots so the old oak keeps listening long after I’m a memory rustling in its leaves.

And if not, that’s alright too. Because I know the tree knows me. Knows the boy with mud on his knees, the man with too many unsaid words, the ghost who still visits when the wind calls his name.

I sit here now, pen in hand, paper pressed to my knee. Another letter waits for its turn to sleep beneath the roots. I write: Dear you. Dear me. Dear world. And the tree listens as it always has until the forest hums with every secret I was brave enough to share.