Audrey Burges
A Field Guide for Arboreal Memory Storage
It’s possible you’ve never had to store a memory. Maybe you’re one of those people who always knows exactly where to find their keys—on the hook, exactly where you left them. The kind of person who’s never coming up with smart storage spots, because Future-You would surely remember the keys are in the right-hand pocket of the black corduroy pants you planned to wear.
If you’re a person who never roams half-naked through your home, lacking both pants and keys, twenty minutes late for an appointment, this advice isn’t for you. Get your put-together self out the door and move along with your undisrupted schedule.
As for the rest of you—the rest of us—you’ve tried everything, I know. Little sing-songs of recollection. Mnemonic devices devised from simple sentences. If you’re particularly Holmes-ian, maybe you’ve built a memory palace to stash your grandmother’s apricot shortbread recipe, tucked under the inlaid banister of some Italian villa in your mind.
Can you remember her laugh, though? That strange dipping trill between two coughing gasps, half mirth and half disaster? There’s a rigidity to palaces that won’t quite host what’s imprecise or unwieldy. When emotion clouds the outward parameters of a memory, how can you find an imaginary drawer to shove it into?
You need something more organic. Something that takes root and grows from what is left behind. You need a tree.
Throwing away your childhood drawings: River Birch
Your mother brought you banker boxes stuffed with every crayola’d scrap you ever touched. The boxes reek of stale tempera paint and mold, and the dark flecks at the bottom are either beans from a collage, or mouse poop.
One by one, pull out every page your mother kept, and watch your childhood unfurl. You reversed your b’s and d’s until fifth grade. You enjoyed a three-year obsession with unicorns before rejecting them as babyish and spending another three years drawing dolphins, inverted V-fins breaking scalloped lines of waves.
You drew your first love. It’s a terrible likeness, but you got the grin right.
Let the memories pile up on the floor. This is what river birches do, dropping spirals of bark to the ground. Everything about them is messy and inconvenient—they shed twigs and catkins and dusty pollen that makes you sneeze, makes you tear up. Picture one untidy tree rooted to a bank. Store this memory among its buds.
A warning, though: river birches grow huge and unmanageable. You’d probably be better off without them.
Delivering your first child: Sunset Maple
Before I help you with this one, I have to share something, just because it’s funny: do you know what the Victorians picked to symbolize motherhood? Pussy willow. Yes, seriously. Now you can’t unknow it, and everything about those decorative branches—arched limbs, brown and gray and bumpy, those gloriously soft nubbins you rub absently with your fingers—feels vaguely awkward. I’m sorry. I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.
Anyway, the Victorians got it wrong. Motherhood is a sunset maple. You can picture its flaming branches while you store the memory of that perfect button nose, those alert eyes gazing across the surface of your chest. You can trace the points of its leaves while you let those tiny fingers root themselves into your mind.
A sunset maple fades into the background but is intermittently stunning. It’s sturdy. It’s frequently climbed, sometimes injuriously. And in the end, the fruit it sets grows wings and spins away.
Surviving a plague: Quaking Aspen
A grove of aspens is all one tree. What kills one is likely to kill many. Their stark trunks all have eyes, so they’re forced to watch it happen. What is lost will be buried, sustaining the interlaced roots left behind, feeding an annual vigil of golden light.
The phone call about your first love’s death: Cypress
You thought I was going to say “weeping willow,” didn’t you? What kind of cliché memory method do you think I’m offering? Weeping willows are the basset hounds of trees, hanging over soccer fields, swung on by children high on post-game Capri Suns, adorable. The hang-dogs of nature are never really sad. It’s a ploy for attention.
No, when your mother calls and pre-games death by listing everyone you’ve ever met, including his name as if you may have forgotten him, and then tells you he’s been gone six months? Find a cypress. It has needles but isn’t evergreen, dropping sharp points when you don’t expect them. Even when it stabs a little, it looks a bit feathery and slightly out of focus. Also, cypress resists decay. It will always be as beautiful as the day it was cut down.
The last time you pick your children up to hold them: Fraser Fir
You won’t remember this. You’ll forget the specifics the same way you forget exactly how you decorated last year’s Christmas tree. But it’ll happen one day, one last firm grip to heave a precious burden upward, and then several weeks or months will go by before you realize they’re too big now. They probably won’t realize it either, not until much later, and it will hurt you both. It’s time you pass in common without knowing it. It’s a memory that seems as if it should be unique, but instead blends into a million recollections of moments, brightly lit and twinkling, ephemeral. And then it will be gone.
Audrey Burges writes in Richmond, Virginia. Her debut novel, The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone, is forthcoming in 2023 from Berkley (Penguin Random House), and her work also appears or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, Pithead Chapel, Cease, Cows, HAD, Into the Void, Slackjaw, Belladonna, and other outlets. More of her writing is available at audreyburges.com, and you can follow her on Twitter: @audrey_burges.