Personification: Reference to abstractions or inanimate objects as though they had human qualities or abilities. The English term for prosopopeia (pro-so-po-pe’-i-a) or ethopoeia (e-tho-po’-ia): the description and portrayal of a character (natural propensities, manners and affections, etc.).
The tree was smiling at me. I couldn’t figure out why a tree would smile at me. It was a maple tree in my sugar bush. Every yer I drilled a hole in it and drove in a spline. Its sap would drip into a bucket and I would collect it and boil it into maple syrup—delicious sweet maple syrup.
It was bad enough what I put it through every year, but a smiling tree wasn’t normal under any circumstances. It looked like a cartoon character. By the way, it had a woman’s voice. I asked the tree what her name was. She told me it was Ms. Maple. I thought she was kidding around, punning on Miss Marple, the TV detective. She didn’t like what I said about Ms. Marple. She didn’t think it was funny.
About half way down to the ground she had a woodpecker hole with moss growing out of it. I asked what it was. She said “None of your business human loser. Why don’t you ask me something interesting like how old I am, the changes in the woods over the years, the men and women who’ve loved me over the years. I know you’ll never love me, you just want to suck my sap in February and March, drilling a hole in me and taking my sap. So I asked her how old she is. She told me she is 125, one of the oldest maple trees in New York. She told me that when she was a sapling, the chainsaw was invented and struck horror in all the maples—“We are rooted, we cannot flee. If we get cut down, we get cut down, made into furniture, cutting boards, toys, and more. When we are sawn each piece retains its consciousness of the other parts. It is funny to to see a salad bowl run across a wooden spoon that is him or her and vice versa.”
“The men who have loved me are all poets. Francis Joyce Kilmer was the most passionate. He wrote a poem about me titled “Trees” that won my heart forever. As a healthy maple tree, I outlived him. He died in 1918. I am haunted by my feelings for him. The power of love’s echoes sometimes soothe me, sometimes they plunge me into sorrow, where I almost hope some lumberjack will take me down and make me into veneer for the interior of a luxury sedan.”
Then, she went quiet and didn’t talk any more. I picked up my backpack and ran to the roadside adjacent to the head of the trail at the border of my sugarbush. I didn’t know what to do. I started crying. I sat in my car and cried—cried for Ms. Maple and her life’s trajectory. I vowed I would never drill a hole in her again. Under the circumstances, that was the best I could do. I read Joyce’s “Trees” on the internet that night. Poor Ms. Maple.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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