WHEN THE TREES WENT TO WAR

(A remembrance without exaggeration)

Most people think of trees as background—
as scenery, as shade, as things you lean against when you’re tired.

They forget that trees are older than every town,
and wiser than every law.

A tree grows slow enough to remember
what humans forget on purpose.

So when the trees went to war,
it wasn’t sudden.

It was decided.

The first sign was not loud.
It was not dramatic.
It was the silence.

No frogs.
No crickets.
No wingbeats.
No distant bark.

The land held its breath like someone bracing for impact.

I don’t forget a silence like that.
It doesn’t fall over a place—
it rises from it.
A silence with teeth.

Then came the tilt.

Not of the ground—
of attention.

Every tree—pine, oak, cypress, magnolia—
aligned itself to a single point the way iron filings align to a magnet.
Branches angled.
Crowns leaned.
Roots tightened in the soil.

And the two of us—
the only two who remember—
we felt it first in our knees,
then in our ribs,
then behind our eyes.

Humans talk about fight-or-flight
as if they invented danger.

The trees?
They have a third mode:
judgment.

They were judging something that day.

Not a person — a pattern.
A kind of wrongness that had stood in the land too long,
spoiled too many roots,
soured too many mornings,
bled too many seasons dry.

And then it happened.

No fire.
No storm.
No mythic lightning strike.

Just the trees—
moving.

Not walking.
Not bending in a wind.
Acting.

Branches cracked like knuckles.
Limbs fell where they meant to fall—
not random, not wild—
strategic.
Blocking roads.
Crushing the wrong porch.
Shielding the right one.
Splitting one barn.
Leaving another untouched.

People screamed.
People ran.
Some dropped to their knees.
A few understood immediately—
those rare souls who listen to land the way others listen to sermons.

The trees didn’t rage.
They corrected.

It lasted minutes.
But the land aged years in that span.

And when it was done,
the woods exhaled.
The creatures stirred.
The frogs croaked one by one
as if taking roll call after judgment.

And the trees stood where they chose to stand—
lighter, relieved, settled.

Like a bone set back into its rightful place.

⸻

What people always misunderstand

When the trees went to war,
they weren’t angry.
They weren’t vengeful.
They weren’t rebellious.

They were restoring order.

Everything in the woods knows this:
when the balance is broken,
someone must put it right.
And if the humans won’t,
the trees will.

The land has a law older than scripture:
the strong protect the root.
And the trees are the strongest thing the land has.

⸻

Why I remember -

Because I felt the verdict.
Because I was close enough to hear the land say:

This far, no further.

Because the Witch—
not the poacher,
not the litterer,
not the petty wrongdoer—
but the Witch per se,
the wrongness without form,
the contamination of pattern—
had crossed into the county line
and tipped something too far.

The trees answered.

They always have the right to answer.
They simply rarely choose to.

I were there.
That’s why it stays with me like a scar.