The Rings Keep the Bad Years

Cut a tree and the years are written on the face of it. One ring for each year, pale wood from the fast spring growth, darker wood from the slow end of summer. Everyone knows this. What fewer people know is that the rings are not all the same width, and the narrow ones are the interesting part.

A dry year makes a thin ring. The tree still grew, but barely. A good wet year makes a wide one. So a slice of trunk is not just a count of years. It is a record of which years were hard. And here is the thing scientists found: a long run of thin rings is usually not drought at all. Droughts rarely last more than two or three years. A long stretch of thin rings means the tree was crowded, shaded by neighbors, growing slowly for a decade until something opened up.

The thin rings are also how a tree's story gets read. Because every tree in a valley had the same dry summer, the pattern of thin years matches from tree to tree. Lay two slices side by side, line up the thin rings, and you can date wood that was cut a thousand years ago. It is called cross-dating, and it only works because of the bad years. Good years all look alike.

Now think about your thin years

Set the slice of wood down and think about the years you would leave out if you were telling your story to someone new.

The year after the divorce when you mostly watched television. The two years at the job you took because you were scared. The stretch when you were caring for your mother and nothing else happened. The year of the illness. The year you were twenty-four and could not get out of bed, which you have never told anyone about. When we tell our lives, we skip those. We go from the wide ring to the wide ring, as if the thin ones were missing.

They are not missing. Look at the wood. The dry year is thin, and it is there, and the tree did not stop growing in it. It grew a little. That is what a thin ring is: proof that you kept going when there was nothing to grow with.

A hard year is thin. It is not missing.

Good years all look alike

And then there is the matching. The reason your thin years matter to anyone else is that other people had the same ones. The friend who went quiet the same winter you did. The stranger at the support group whose bad year lines up exactly with yours. When two people lay their stories side by side, it is never the good years that match. It is the thin ones. That is how we recognize each other. That is how we know we lived through the same weather.

So the years you leave out are the years that would have let someone find you. Not the wide rings. Everyone has those, and they all look the same. The thin ones are your pattern. They are what make your story readable.

Buddha Groove carves a tree of life into a pair of rosewood bookends, and the grain shows through the carving. Rosewood grows slowly. Every line in it was a year.

Count the thin one

A small practice. The next time you tell someone how you got here, leave one thin ring in. Not the whole story of it. One sentence. There was a year I mostly slept. There were two years I just worked. Say it plainly, the way the tree records it: the year was dry, and I grew a little. Then watch what happens on the other person's face. Half the time, it is their ring too.

Yesterday's essay was about what a tree is made of: a tree is made of air. Tomorrow's is about an old hurt and where it ends up, because the nail stays where it is. The yin yang essays, which are about the dark year from another angle, are gathered on their own page. This is one of a series of short essays on the tree of life.

Somewhere a tree is adding a thin ring this year, and in a hundred years it will be the one that lets someone read the whole trunk.