Dendrographia (den-dro-graf’-ia): Creating an illusion of reality through vivid description of a tree.
I was tipsy. I shouldn’t have been driving, but I was 17 and wild. With my arm around my girl and one hand on the wheel, I was driving 30MPH so we wouldn’t be killed. I kept weaving over across my lane, but it didn’t matter. It was 2.00 am and the roads were deserted. I had already amassed three DWI tickets. Back then, you needed six before the penalties kicked in, like having your license suspended.
Marla didn’t care what I did. She was 17 too and she loved me. We would go parking down by what we called “Moon River.” She would say “No. Not yet!” Although it was difficult, I waited. Tonight, I had had a bit too much to drink. I stumbled out of the car, grabbed ahold of a tree, and puked.
It was a birch tree and my wine-tinted vomit gave its white bark a pinkish color. As I held onto the tree, its bark felt velvety—I was surprised. I had never bothered to touch birch bark before. I went back the next day. I peeled off a piece of bark. When I got home, I wrote a love poem on it to Mandy, my girlfriend: “Birch bark reminds me of your skin, it raises my hope that we will sin down by Moon River where the birch trees grow. Oh baby. Wo, wo, wo!”
After I gave her the poem, she wrote back to me on a piece of sandpaper: “You disgust me like moldy food. Don’t try to call me. It’ll do you no good. You stink. You’re the missing link.”
I cried for two days. I went down by Moon River. For some reason I hugged the birch tree. I felt the velvet white bark with little black bumps. I looked up and saw the catkins dangling and blowing back and forth in the wind. The small green leaves fluttered like feathers, holding tight to the tree’s slender limbs.
Two years later I found a baby birch growing by the tree. I dug it up and transplanted it in my backyard. Mom loved it. I graduated from high school, was drafted, and went to Vietnam. I had hoped to see my little tree when I came home. I didn’t expect to die.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.
The Daily Trope 