ANOTHER TREE IN THE FOREST by Darcy Holmes • Cleaver Magazine

A Writing Tip by Darcy Holmes
ANOTHER TREE IN THE FOREST

My daughter turned one just two months ago. Every day it seems she sees something for the first time in her entire life. Trees, for example. I take her for walks around our neighborhood almost every evening after dinner. In Spring, when the magnolia trees were in bloom, we were on our almost-daily walk, and I smelled the sweet fragrance before I knew where it was coming from. We stopped, and she stared at the hearty, deep pink flowers whose petals fade to a stark white at the tips on the magnolia’s sturdy branches on the corner of Fairview and Ava.

“This is a tree. It has flowers! Breathe in; do you smell them?”

She doesn’t yet know what I mean when I say “smell,” but with her tiny finger in the air, she proclaimed, “Bee!”

For many walks thereafter, I stopped at trees, green with leaves or pink and white with flowers, and pointed at them. “Tree!” I would say. But for at least two weeks, she’d only recognize the magnolia on the corner of Fairview as such. (Well, actually, she says “Bee!” still.) After a while, I’d forgotten about stopping at every tree during our walks, pointing at them, telling her “Tree! Ch-ch-TREE!”

One day, we took a different route for our walk, a short cut. It was chilly, and I felt like just getting outside for our walk was enough to say I’d done something good with my day. So I cut our walk short to get out of the cold. A warm blanket and her bedtime routine on my mind, I was navigating the stroller over the fractured sidewalk, the roots of trees subtly disrupting the human effort to defy nature. My daughter’s finger suddenly in the air, I heard a confident, little voice: “Bee!” I looked up toward the sky and saw that we were, indeed, under the canopy of an oak tree. It was a proud moment.

This anecdote right here is just like a million other stories about watching a child learn new things for the first time. This is nothing “new” about life. As special as these moments are to me, whenever I’m lucky enough to be in them, I am fully aware of the fact that my daughter is not the first toddler to point at things and attempt to say them.

Attempt to say them.

Maybe that’s what writing an essay is. I witness things in my life that strike me as odd or extraordinary, and I know there is a really high probability that I have not discovered something brand new to humanity. But it’s new to me, and I attempt to say it anyway. I take it into my palms. I gaze at it, turn it over and over in my hands, run my fingers over it, feeling for grooves or scratches, something that can help me put a name to it. I sit and I wonder what it is, what I just witnessed.

Come to the page curious. Come to the page uncertain of how to say it. Come to the page like it’s your first time at a new park and there’s no map. Go to that park day after day, week after week, until you start to feel like you maybe know your way around. Maybe you see a tree. Maybe it’s a bee. Maybe you’ll never feel like you really understand what it is because you’re only human and you can only read and question and research so much.

Attempt to say it. Say it all. Even if someone else may have said it already.

Your essay — among the millions of other essays and poems and studies and stories and articles — is a tree in a lush, green forest that, sure, has some trash that stinks of hate, which harms the environment and the soil. Ultimately, it gets to be a forest because of the millions of other people who wrote the truth, as honestly as they could, uncertain anyone would ever care. And there are all different kinds of trees that pretty much look the same, but if you look carefully, you’ll see every single tree is different: some are tall, some are short. Some have been around for hundreds of years, and some are just babies who hope they get enough sunshine to grow.

Imagine how empty this forest would be if everyone just assumed that whatever they had to say had already been said and that it was completely useless to spend the time writing down how your feet hurt after a long day of work. Or how the sky looks like a brilliantly different shade of pink than it normally does at sunset in May, and why is that? How your job needs you to spend time working at home on the weekend but is prepared to penalize you for spending time homing at work, as if that’s even possible?

Being another tree in the forest isn’t a bad thing. If you’re lucky, a bird will rest upon a branch of your essay and wonder, right along with you, what this all means; if you’re lucky, a child will stumble up to your tree and point at it with the same wonder you had when you planted its seed and watered it and helped it grow. Because your essays actually do matter — a lot. Without them, where there should be a forest, there would only be wind.

Darcy Holmes is an essayist from South Jersey who is finishing an MA in Writing from Rowan University this fall. When she is not writing, you’ll find her stitching pictures for loved ones or strumming a guitar.