Rings

Each ring is a year made visible. The zelkova does not remember — it records. Drought narrows the band to a whisper. A wet spring swells it wide, generous with cellulose. The oldest specimens carry eight centuries of weather in their cross-sections, a climate archive more reliable than any instrument humans have built.

To read a tree ring is to practice a particular kind of patience. The data is there, encoded in millimeters of growth, but it yields its meaning slowly. You must count inward, from bark to heartwood, from present to past. The outermost ring is this year. The innermost is the year the seed first cracked its shell and committed to becoming something tall.

There is no shortcut through a tree ring. No fast-forward. Each band must be witnessed in sequence, the way the tree itself experienced the years: one after another, without skipping.