The Trees Grow an Accent

Pic: View from top of the steps that separate Manayunk from Roxborough

As you get further from home, the trees grow an accent. Slightly darker than you’re used to, a bit skinnier. Maybe a mottled gray bark you’ve never seen. If you keep going far enough, eventually the subtle differences build to a culture shock. A different language. Someone else’s home.

There are no woods in New York City. Only fake little landscaped parks with no deer. A tight cement gravestone barely pockmarked. A foot stomps every sidewalk flower. The air is so tepid, hollow, pale, watered down. I wish I could open the window of the entire city itself. When someone tells me they’re from here, I can’t believe they’re alive.

I can not stay here. I’ll escape eventually. I’m some version of touch starved, but for tulip fog on my tongue. For a while, I was sustained by flashbacks to the Manayunk bridge. I wish I could breathe a memory.

Back in Pennsylvania, the trees have no accent to me. The sun is at a familiar angle in the sky. What a difference that makes, like a strange filter has been lifted. It’s been a while since I’ve followed a good creek. My old river walking path just got a fresh new bench at a prime spot.

A tree’s voice is not directly just their form, or their colors, or their bark, but how they talk through the air. They literally talk to each other by releasing chemicals – I wonder if we can we tell? Maybe when we breathe them in, we can listen. If different trees release different pheromones, speaking dialects of molecules on the wind, then all forests truly, literally have an accent.

New York City is a hushed mumble. Dogwood, cherry, and magnolia is my mother tongue.

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