WEBVTT
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This is not your universe, but someone lives here.
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Welcome to Elsewhere Weekly, a new universe every week.
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Never the same world twice.
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This week, a world that might be your own, seen at a speed you have never lived at.
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Our narrator is 300 years old, has never moved an inch, and is about to have the worst afternoon of its life.
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To an oak, an afternoon is a year.
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You think quickly.
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I know this about you.
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I have watched your kind for three hundred years, and you flicker.
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You arrive at the field edge, you make your sounds, you touch, you leave, and to me it is all one gesture, the way a sparrow is one gesture.
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Do not be insulted.
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It is only a difference of clocks.
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You live at the speed of breath, I live at the speed of seasons.
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A year to me is an afternoon.
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This story is one afternoon.
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It begins in the morning of it, which you would call March.
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I should say what I am.
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I am an oak.
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I stand at the edge of a field that has been ploughed in one direction or another, for as long as I have stood here, which is three hundred years, or, as I measure it, three hundred afternoons, one long summer of a life.
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I was an acorn once, buried by a jay and forgotten, which is the only way anyone like me is ever born, as someone else's forgotten lunch.
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Remember that.
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It matters later.
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I do not see the way you see.
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I feel light, the way you feel warmth in a doorway.
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I hear nothing, but I am not alone, and I am not without news, because under the field, under the hedgerow, under the little wood beyond it, there runs the slow web, the root net, thread of fungus and thread of root, joined tree to tree for a mile in every direction.
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You would call it whispering.
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It is slower than whispering.
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A message moves through the net, the way damp moves through a wall.
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News from the far wood takes a week to reach me.
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But it reaches me.
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It has always reached me.
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That March morning, the first news of the afternoon came up through my roots, and it was this.
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The man had stopped coming.
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You must understand about the man.
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There has always been a man or a woman, and always of the same family, the way there has always been me.
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Eleven of them, one after another, in my three hundred years.
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I have known them by their weight on the ground over my roots, and by the taste of the field they kept.
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The first one I knew planted the hedgerow.
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One of them, long ago, hung a rope from my lowest branch, and for forty years two generations of flickering children swung on it, wearing a bare patch in the grass that I fed on all the same.
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One of them, a girl, sat against my trunk through a hundred summer evenings with paper in her hands, so still, for one of you, that I almost learned her.
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She carved two letters into me the year she stopped coming.
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I have carried her letters up with me as I grew.
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They are higher than a house now.
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She does not know that.
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How could she?
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The last man, the eleventh, was old and light, and walked the field edge every morning, and put his hand flat against my bark each time he passed.
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An odd, small custom that I had come over forty years, to count on the way you count on the sun.
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In March the hand stopped.
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I want to tell you that I grieved quickly, the way you do, with water and sound.
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I cannot.
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Grief, for me, is a season.
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It moves through the rings.
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All that outer spring I listened down the net for his weight somewhere on the land, and it did not come.
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And the hedgerow hawthorns, who hear everything because they stand along the road, sent up the slow word at last, in what you would call April.
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Gone, they said.
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The man is gone the way all of them go, and after him nothing.
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No new weight learning the field.
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The field went unploughed.
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For the first time in three hundred years my field, in spring, grew only weeds.
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You would call that peaceful, I think.
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Wildflowers.
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You have no idea how loud an unploughed field is to those of us who listen underground.
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It sounded like a held breath.
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Then, in the part of the afternoon you would call May, the ribbons came.
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They arrived as all of your things arrive in a flicker.
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Three of you, walking the field in lines too straight to be walking, standing metal sticks in the ground, sighting along them, making your sounds.
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One of you came to me.
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I felt the little wound, less than a woodpecker, a staple, and a strip of something not alive tied about my waist, bright, the Hawthorns said later, orange, a color I took their word for.
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All down the hedgerow, the same.
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A ribbon on the beach in the wood, a ribbon on the young ash by the gate, who is forty and excitable, and asked the net all summer what it meant, faster than the net could carry the question.
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I knew what it meant.
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I am three hundred years old.
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Nothing good in all my afternoon, has ever been tied to a tree by a person walking in a straight line.
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And here I must tell you the news that had come up the net two summers before, from the elm row three fields west, beyond the stream.
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The elms were old friends of the net, great senders, their roots generous.
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Two summers ago their messages changed.
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Machines had come, they said.
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Yellow, the size of barns, and the ground shook, and then, one by one, in the middle of ordinary sentences, the elms stopped, not died back, not sickened, which we would have tasted for a year in advance.
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Stopped.
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A voice in the net one week, and the next week, where the voice had been, nothing.
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A torn edge, threads waving in empty soil.
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Fourteen elms.
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It took eleven days.
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We heard it through the ground as a shaking, and afterward the stream tasted of clay for a whole season.
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That is what a ribbon means.
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The elms had worn them too.
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So now you know what I knew, in the middle of my afternoon, in what you would call June.
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The man was gone, the field was sold, the ribbon was on me, and the machines were one summer away, maybe two.
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And I want you to sit for a moment inside my particular helplessness, because I have had three hundred years to sit inside yours, and I think it is only fair.
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You flicker, but you can run.
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You can put your children on your back and go.
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I am rooted to one circle of earth twelve strides across.
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I have stood in it since before your grandmother's grandmother's grandmother, and everything I am, every ring, every carved letter, every year of light is fixed to the one exact place the danger is coming to.
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A tree cannot flee.
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A tree cannot hide.
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A tree cannot plead.
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Here is what a tree can do.
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A tree can spend.
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There is a thing my kind does some years that your kind has noticed and named.
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You call it a masked year.
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Once in a handful of autumns, for reasons your scientists argue about, every oak across a whole country will pour itself out at once, acorns beyond counting, beyond eating, so many that the jays and the squirrels and the boars cannot possibly take them all.
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And some, the forgotten ones, the buried ones, live.
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You argue about how we choose the year.
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I will tell you how I chose mine.
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I chose it because the machines were coming, and spending was the only verb I had left.
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All that summer I starved my own wood to feed the crop.
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I let leaves yellow early.
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I pulled everything, three hundred years of practice at turning light into life, down into acorns.
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And listen, because the girl who read against my trunk grew up loving numbers, and somewhere in me I have loved them ever since.
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An oak my age, in the years it bears, makes tens of thousands of acorns, across a long life, millions.
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Ten million, perhaps, in three hundred years.
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And out of ten million, the number that becomes a standing oak is one, perhaps two.
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That is the arithmetic I was born from, one jay's forgetfulness against ten million failures, and I have never once resented it.
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But that summer I meant to bend it.
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That autumn I dropped acorns the way the sky drops rain.
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The ground under me was brown with them.
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The jays came in numbers I had not felt since the girl was small, and they did what jays have always done, which is steal, and fly far, and bury, and forget.
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Every theft was a hope.
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I could feel them lifting off my branches all through what you call October, each one carrying a possible me.
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Out beyond the ribboned hedgerow, beyond the road, out to gardens and verges and churchyards I will never taste.
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Go, I told them, in the only language I have, which is abundance.
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Go, be forgotten somewhere kind.
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That was my afternoon's work.
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That was my flight, my hiding, my pleading, all of it, done the one way a tree can do anything, downward and outward, and by ten thousand at a time.
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And then, in the cold end of the afternoon, in what you would call November, with my leaves down and my crops spent, and the ribbon still on me, the flickers came back.
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And this time, among the straight walking strangers, there was a weight I knew.
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I must be careful here, because I do not want to tell you more than I can honestly know, and I am old enough to know the difference.
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Here is what I felt a person, slow for one of you, slow the way the old are slow, walking not in a line but wandering, the way the reading girl used to wander.
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The weight came across the field and stopped under me, and a hand went flat against my bark, in the exact place I would swear it on my deepest root, the exact place the eleventh man used to lay his.
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And then the hand went to the two carved letters, not to the letters themselves.
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They are far above any hand now, remember.
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It went to the height where the letters used to be, the height of a girl, and rested there a long time, a very long time, a minute at least, which for one of you is an era.
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There were sounds then, many of them, back and forth between her and the straight walkers.
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I do not hear.
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I will never know what was said in the November air.
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This is the part of my story where you would want the speech, the argument, the moment won, and I cannot give it to you because I live below all of that.
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I can only tell you what the ground told me.
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The ribbon came off.
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Not all the ribbons.
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I will not lie to you, because the net does not lie.
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The hawthorn hedgerow kept theirs, all that funny gossiping row who had stood along the road for two hundred and eighty years, and the young ash by the gate kept his, and in the spring that ended my afternoon, the machines came exactly as the elms had promised, yellow and huge, and the ground shook for twenty days, and one by one, in the middle of sentences, the hawthorn stopped, and the ash stopped.
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Forty years old, still asking what the ribbon meant, I felt every torn thread.
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The net went quiet on three sides of me, quieter than it has been in my whole afternoon, and the field I had fed on for three hundred years disappeared under stone, and where there had been one old man's wait, there came hundreds of small quick weights, and frames and walls, and by the following autumn there were houses to the edge of my shade.
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But on me, where the ribbon was, there is now a small metal disc, stapled where the staple was, and around my trunk, at the distance you flickers seem to consider respectful, a low fence, and inside the fence grass.
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They left me a circle of earth twelve strides across.
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It is my exact old circle.
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Someone measured my roots, and drew a line around my life, and told the machines not this one.
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I believe it was her.
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I believe the reading girl, grown old, came back across her grandfather's field, and stood where her letters used to be, and spent whatever it is you spend, sound and paper, and standing in cold fields, to buy an oak a fence.
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I believe it the way I believe in South.
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I cannot prove it.
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She flickers, I stand, and the truth of it lives at a speed I will never move at.
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Here is how my afternoon ends.
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It is evening now, by which I mean it is winter, and there is snow, and the new houses breathe their warm air, and small quick children I do not know yet are wearing a bare patch in the grass inside my fence, which I will feed on all the same.
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And someone has hung from my lowest branch, which is not low anymore, a rope.
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And three nights ago, in the deep cold, along the one thread of the old net that survived under the new road, something touched my roots.
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Faint New A seedling's voice, from a garden two streets into the houses, from an acorn buried in the panic and glory of my mast, year by some jay who kept her appointment with forgetfulness.
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It said what every seedling says, the first words of the only conversation there is.
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It said, I am here, is anyone there?
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I am three hundred years old, I have lost my field, my hedgerow, my gossips, my ash, my eleven keepers, my reading girl, and the shape of the entire world I grew in, all in one afternoon, and I pushed what I had left down the one surviving thread, at the speed of damp through a wall, a week for a single word, and the word I sent was daughter.
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The word I sent was here.
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That was root and branch, universe zero zero four of Elsewhere Weekly.
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That universe is closed now.
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We will never go back.
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Next week, a new sky, a new world, a new someone, somewhere else.
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Until next week.
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Hold your ground.
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This is not your universe, but someone lives here.
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Welcome to Elsewhere Weekly, a new universe every week.
00:01:03.500 --> 00:01:05.739
Never the same world twice.
00:01:06.140 --> 00:01:11.819
This week, a world that might be your own, seen at a speed you have never lived at.
00:01:12.060 --> 00:01:19.579
Our narrator is 300 years old, has never moved an inch, and is about to have the worst afternoon of its life.
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To an oak, an afternoon is a year.
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You think quickly.
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I know this about you.
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I have watched your kind for three hundred years, and you flicker.
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You arrive at the field edge, you make your sounds, you touch, you leave, and to me it is all one gesture, the way a sparrow is one gesture.
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Do not be insulted.
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It is only a difference of clocks.
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You live at the speed of breath, I live at the speed of seasons.
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A year to me is an afternoon.
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This story is one afternoon.
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It begins in the morning of it, which you would call March.
00:02:06.219 --> 00:02:08.139
I should say what I am.
00:02:08.459 --> 00:02:09.740
I am an oak.
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I stand at the edge of a field that has been ploughed in one direction or another, for as long as I have stood here, which is three hundred years, or, as I measure it, three hundred afternoons, one long summer of a life.
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I was an acorn once, buried by a jay and forgotten, which is the only way anyone like me is ever born, as someone else's forgotten lunch.
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Remember that.
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It matters later.
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I do not see the way you see.
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I feel light, the way you feel warmth in a doorway.
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I hear nothing, but I am not alone, and I am not without news, because under the field, under the hedgerow, under the little wood beyond it, there runs the slow web, the root net, thread of fungus and thread of root, joined tree to tree for a mile in every direction.
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You would call it whispering.
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It is slower than whispering.
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A message moves through the net, the way damp moves through a wall.
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News from the far wood takes a week to reach me.
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But it reaches me.
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It has always reached me.
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That March morning, the first news of the afternoon came up through my roots, and it was this.
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The man had stopped coming.
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You must understand about the man.
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There has always been a man or a woman, and always of the same family, the way there has always been me.
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Eleven of them, one after another, in my three hundred years.
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I have known them by their weight on the ground over my roots, and by the taste of the field they kept.
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The first one I knew planted the hedgerow.
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One of them, long ago, hung a rope from my lowest branch, and for forty years two generations of flickering children swung on it, wearing a bare patch in the grass that I fed on all the same.
00:04:15.180 --> 00:04:26.699
One of them, a girl, sat against my trunk through a hundred summer evenings with paper in her hands, so still, for one of you, that I almost learned her.
00:04:26.939 --> 00:04:30.620
She carved two letters into me the year she stopped coming.
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I have carried her letters up with me as I grew.
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They are higher than a house now.
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She does not know that.
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How could she?
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The last man, the eleventh, was old and light, and walked the field edge every morning, and put his hand flat against my bark each time he passed.
00:04:50.939 --> 00:04:57.819
An odd, small custom that I had come over forty years, to count on the way you count on the sun.
00:04:58.220 --> 00:05:00.860
In March the hand stopped.
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I want to tell you that I grieved quickly, the way you do, with water and sound.
00:05:07.819 --> 00:05:09.020
I cannot.
00:05:09.259 --> 00:05:11.980
Grief, for me, is a season.
00:05:12.300 --> 00:05:14.139
It moves through the rings.
00:05:14.540 --> 00:05:21.259
All that outer spring I listened down the net for his weight somewhere on the land, and it did not come.
00:05:21.500 --> 00:05:32.620
And the hedgerow hawthorns, who hear everything because they stand along the road, sent up the slow word at last, in what you would call April.
00:05:33.259 --> 00:05:34.860
Gone, they said.
00:05:35.420 --> 00:05:40.780
The man is gone the way all of them go, and after him nothing.
00:05:41.180 --> 00:05:43.259
No new weight learning the field.
00:05:43.500 --> 00:05:45.420
The field went unploughed.
00:05:45.660 --> 00:05:51.259
For the first time in three hundred years my field, in spring, grew only weeds.
00:05:51.660 --> 00:05:53.740
You would call that peaceful, I think.
00:05:54.060 --> 00:05:55.180
Wildflowers.
00:05:55.500 --> 00:06:00.939
You have no idea how loud an unploughed field is to those of us who listen underground.
00:06:01.180 --> 00:06:03.340
It sounded like a held breath.
00:06:03.580 --> 00:06:08.379
Then, in the part of the afternoon you would call May, the ribbons came.
00:06:08.620 --> 00:06:12.379
They arrived as all of your things arrive in a flicker.
00:06:12.939 --> 00:06:23.420
Three of you, walking the field in lines too straight to be walking, standing metal sticks in the ground, sighting along them, making your sounds.
00:06:23.740 --> 00:06:25.580
One of you came to me.
00:06:25.819 --> 00:06:40.379
I felt the little wound, less than a woodpecker, a staple, and a strip of something not alive tied about my waist, bright, the Hawthorns said later, orange, a color I took their word for.
00:06:40.780 --> 00:06:43.500
All down the hedgerow, the same.
00:06:43.819 --> 00:06:56.620
A ribbon on the beach in the wood, a ribbon on the young ash by the gate, who is forty and excitable, and asked the net all summer what it meant, faster than the net could carry the question.
00:06:56.939 --> 00:06:58.379
I knew what it meant.
00:06:58.699 --> 00:07:01.020
I am three hundred years old.
00:07:01.340 --> 00:07:08.939
Nothing good in all my afternoon, has ever been tied to a tree by a person walking in a straight line.
00:07:09.180 --> 00:07:19.100
And here I must tell you the news that had come up the net two summers before, from the elm row three fields west, beyond the stream.
00:07:19.340 --> 00:07:24.540
The elms were old friends of the net, great senders, their roots generous.
00:07:24.780 --> 00:07:27.500
Two summers ago their messages changed.
00:07:27.740 --> 00:07:29.900
Machines had come, they said.
00:07:30.300 --> 00:07:45.900
Yellow, the size of barns, and the ground shook, and then, one by one, in the middle of ordinary sentences, the elms stopped, not died back, not sickened, which we would have tasted for a year in advance.
00:07:46.220 --> 00:07:47.100
Stopped.
00:07:47.420 --> 00:07:52.860
A voice in the net one week, and the next week, where the voice had been, nothing.
00:07:53.180 --> 00:07:56.939
A torn edge, threads waving in empty soil.
00:07:57.259 --> 00:07:58.780
Fourteen elms.
00:07:59.020 --> 00:08:00.620
It took eleven days.
00:08:00.939 --> 00:08:07.259
We heard it through the ground as a shaking, and afterward the stream tasted of clay for a whole season.
00:08:07.580 --> 00:08:09.500
That is what a ribbon means.
00:08:09.740 --> 00:08:11.660
The elms had worn them too.
00:08:12.620 --> 00:08:19.660
So now you know what I knew, in the middle of my afternoon, in what you would call June.
00:08:19.900 --> 00:08:27.980
The man was gone, the field was sold, the ribbon was on me, and the machines were one summer away, maybe two.
00:08:28.379 --> 00:08:40.460
And I want you to sit for a moment inside my particular helplessness, because I have had three hundred years to sit inside yours, and I think it is only fair.
00:08:40.699 --> 00:08:43.259
You flicker, but you can run.
00:08:43.580 --> 00:08:46.379
You can put your children on your back and go.
00:08:46.860 --> 00:08:51.179
I am rooted to one circle of earth twelve strides across.
00:08:51.500 --> 00:09:07.259
I have stood in it since before your grandmother's grandmother's grandmother, and everything I am, every ring, every carved letter, every year of light is fixed to the one exact place the danger is coming to.
00:09:07.500 --> 00:09:09.100
A tree cannot flee.
00:09:09.340 --> 00:09:10.939
A tree cannot hide.
00:09:11.179 --> 00:09:12.860
A tree cannot plead.
00:09:13.179 --> 00:09:14.939
Here is what a tree can do.
00:09:15.179 --> 00:09:16.620
A tree can spend.
00:09:16.860 --> 00:09:22.139
There is a thing my kind does some years that your kind has noticed and named.
00:09:22.379 --> 00:09:24.620
You call it a masked year.
00:09:24.940 --> 00:09:43.740
Once in a handful of autumns, for reasons your scientists argue about, every oak across a whole country will pour itself out at once, acorns beyond counting, beyond eating, so many that the jays and the squirrels and the boars cannot possibly take them all.
00:09:44.139 --> 00:09:48.940
And some, the forgotten ones, the buried ones, live.
00:09:49.419 --> 00:09:52.139
You argue about how we choose the year.
00:09:52.379 --> 00:09:54.940
I will tell you how I chose mine.
00:09:55.340 --> 00:10:01.740
I chose it because the machines were coming, and spending was the only verb I had left.
00:10:02.060 --> 00:10:05.899
All that summer I starved my own wood to feed the crop.
00:10:06.139 --> 00:10:08.300
I let leaves yellow early.
00:10:08.539 --> 00:10:16.139
I pulled everything, three hundred years of practice at turning light into life, down into acorns.
00:10:16.460 --> 00:10:24.460
And listen, because the girl who read against my trunk grew up loving numbers, and somewhere in me I have loved them ever since.
00:10:24.700 --> 00:10:33.180
An oak my age, in the years it bears, makes tens of thousands of acorns, across a long life, millions.
00:10:33.659 --> 00:10:37.259
Ten million, perhaps, in three hundred years.
00:10:37.500 --> 00:10:43.820
And out of ten million, the number that becomes a standing oak is one, perhaps two.
00:10:44.220 --> 00:10:53.740
That is the arithmetic I was born from, one jay's forgetfulness against ten million failures, and I have never once resented it.
00:10:54.060 --> 00:10:56.779
But that summer I meant to bend it.
00:10:57.180 --> 00:11:01.580
That autumn I dropped acorns the way the sky drops rain.
00:11:01.820 --> 00:11:04.460
The ground under me was brown with them.
00:11:04.700 --> 00:11:17.259
The jays came in numbers I had not felt since the girl was small, and they did what jays have always done, which is steal, and fly far, and bury, and forget.
00:11:17.740 --> 00:11:19.500
Every theft was a hope.
00:11:19.740 --> 00:11:27.180
I could feel them lifting off my branches all through what you call October, each one carrying a possible me.
00:11:27.740 --> 00:11:35.740
Out beyond the ribboned hedgerow, beyond the road, out to gardens and verges and churchyards I will never taste.
00:11:36.060 --> 00:11:41.100
Go, I told them, in the only language I have, which is abundance.
00:11:41.419 --> 00:11:44.539
Go, be forgotten somewhere kind.
00:11:44.940 --> 00:11:47.100
That was my afternoon's work.
00:11:47.340 --> 00:12:00.139
That was my flight, my hiding, my pleading, all of it, done the one way a tree can do anything, downward and outward, and by ten thousand at a time.
00:12:01.180 --> 00:12:12.700
And then, in the cold end of the afternoon, in what you would call November, with my leaves down and my crops spent, and the ribbon still on me, the flickers came back.
00:12:13.019 --> 00:12:18.460
And this time, among the straight walking strangers, there was a weight I knew.
00:12:18.700 --> 00:12:26.620
I must be careful here, because I do not want to tell you more than I can honestly know, and I am old enough to know the difference.
00:12:26.940 --> 00:12:40.539
Here is what I felt a person, slow for one of you, slow the way the old are slow, walking not in a line but wandering, the way the reading girl used to wander.
00:12:40.940 --> 00:12:56.379
The weight came across the field and stopped under me, and a hand went flat against my bark, in the exact place I would swear it on my deepest root, the exact place the eleventh man used to lay his.
00:12:56.779 --> 00:13:02.620
And then the hand went to the two carved letters, not to the letters themselves.
00:13:02.940 --> 00:13:06.300
They are far above any hand now, remember.
00:13:06.700 --> 00:13:19.820
It went to the height where the letters used to be, the height of a girl, and rested there a long time, a very long time, a minute at least, which for one of you is an era.
00:13:20.220 --> 00:13:26.860
There were sounds then, many of them, back and forth between her and the straight walkers.
00:13:27.180 --> 00:13:28.620
I do not hear.
00:13:28.940 --> 00:13:32.539
I will never know what was said in the November air.
00:13:32.860 --> 00:13:43.899
This is the part of my story where you would want the speech, the argument, the moment won, and I cannot give it to you because I live below all of that.
00:13:44.139 --> 00:13:47.580
I can only tell you what the ground told me.
00:13:47.820 --> 00:13:49.500
The ribbon came off.
00:13:49.899 --> 00:13:51.580
Not all the ribbons.
00:13:51.980 --> 00:13:56.139
I will not lie to you, because the net does not lie.
00:13:56.460 --> 00:14:26.379
The hawthorn hedgerow kept theirs, all that funny gossiping row who had stood along the road for two hundred and eighty years, and the young ash by the gate kept his, and in the spring that ended my afternoon, the machines came exactly as the elms had promised, yellow and huge, and the ground shook for twenty days, and one by one, in the middle of sentences, the hawthorn stopped, and the ash stopped.
00:14:26.700 --> 00:14:33.259
Forty years old, still asking what the ribbon meant, I felt every torn thread.
00:14:33.500 --> 00:14:58.060
The net went quiet on three sides of me, quieter than it has been in my whole afternoon, and the field I had fed on for three hundred years disappeared under stone, and where there had been one old man's wait, there came hundreds of small quick weights, and frames and walls, and by the following autumn there were houses to the edge of my shade.
00:14:58.379 --> 00:15:14.220
But on me, where the ribbon was, there is now a small metal disc, stapled where the staple was, and around my trunk, at the distance you flickers seem to consider respectful, a low fence, and inside the fence grass.
00:15:14.539 --> 00:15:17.899
They left me a circle of earth twelve strides across.
00:15:18.139 --> 00:15:20.460
It is my exact old circle.
00:15:20.700 --> 00:15:27.899
Someone measured my roots, and drew a line around my life, and told the machines not this one.
00:15:29.019 --> 00:15:30.860
I believe it was her.
00:15:31.180 --> 00:15:47.659
I believe the reading girl, grown old, came back across her grandfather's field, and stood where her letters used to be, and spent whatever it is you spend, sound and paper, and standing in cold fields, to buy an oak a fence.
00:15:48.060 --> 00:15:50.940
I believe it the way I believe in South.
00:15:51.180 --> 00:15:52.700
I cannot prove it.
00:15:53.019 --> 00:15:58.700
She flickers, I stand, and the truth of it lives at a speed I will never move at.
00:15:58.940 --> 00:16:01.340
Here is how my afternoon ends.
00:16:01.580 --> 00:16:18.700
It is evening now, by which I mean it is winter, and there is snow, and the new houses breathe their warm air, and small quick children I do not know yet are wearing a bare patch in the grass inside my fence, which I will feed on all the same.
00:16:19.019 --> 00:16:24.700
And someone has hung from my lowest branch, which is not low anymore, a rope.
00:16:25.019 --> 00:16:34.379
And three nights ago, in the deep cold, along the one thread of the old net that survived under the new road, something touched my roots.
00:16:34.779 --> 00:16:49.180
Faint New A seedling's voice, from a garden two streets into the houses, from an acorn buried in the panic and glory of my mast, year by some jay who kept her appointment with forgetfulness.
00:16:49.419 --> 00:16:55.659
It said what every seedling says, the first words of the only conversation there is.
00:16:55.899 --> 00:16:59.019
It said, I am here, is anyone there?
00:16:59.259 --> 00:17:23.899
I am three hundred years old, I have lost my field, my hedgerow, my gossips, my ash, my eleven keepers, my reading girl, and the shape of the entire world I grew in, all in one afternoon, and I pushed what I had left down the one surviving thread, at the speed of damp through a wall, a week for a single word, and the word I sent was daughter.
00:17:24.379 --> 00:17:26.619
The word I sent was here.
00:17:28.460 --> 00:17:33.659
That was root and branch, universe zero zero four of Elsewhere Weekly.
00:17:33.899 --> 00:17:36.059
That universe is closed now.
00:17:36.379 --> 00:17:37.899
We will never go back.
00:17:38.220 --> 00:17:44.059
Next week, a new sky, a new world, a new someone, somewhere else.
00:17:44.299 --> 00:17:45.819
Until next week.
00:17:46.059 --> 00:17:47.500
Hold your ground.
