I sit once more at my desk, the pen resting between my fingers, and my gaze drifts beyond the window. The lake glimmers now in the full light of morning, and the birches at its edge whisper and sigh in the breeze. Their slender trunks catch the sun's touch, pale silver against the green of new leaves.
The sight draws me backward, across the long thread of years, to the first forest I ever knew — the birch wood that stood beyond my boyhood home.
Even now, I can close my eyes and walk its paths.
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I was perhaps five, perhaps six, when I first dared to wander beneath its boughs alone. The birch trunks rose straight and white as bones, their bark peeling in thin papery curls that fluttered in the breeze. The leaves trembled on every branch, catching the sunlight so that the whole wood seemed to shimmer, as if I had stepped into a place not quite of this world.
The ground was soft beneath my bare feet, carpeted with last autumn's leaves and this spring's green moss. Here and there, ferns unfurled like the scrolls of ancient books, and small white flowers nodded in the shade. The air smelled of damp earth, of growing things, of life hidden beneath the soil and rising toward the sky.
I remember the sound most of all. The wind threading through the high branches, setting the leaves to murmuring — a sound like rain upon water, like the soft voice of a stream over stones. The forest spoke, and I stood still and listened, as I always did.
In that place, I felt smaller than I had ever felt — and safer. The trees seemed to lean together above me, their arms woven in a shelter against the wide, unknowable sky. The world beyond the forest's edge fell away, and I walked in a cathedral of green and silver light.
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I write these things, and as the ink flows across the page, the room around me seems to fade. I am a boy again, stepping between the trees, my heart beating with wonder, my breath held as if a single word might break the spell.
There were deer in that wood. I saw them often, slipping silent as shadows through the undergrowth. Their eyes were wide and dark, and they seemed to look into my soul before vanishing between the trunks. There were hares too, and foxes, and birds whose names I did not know then — birds whose songs filled the air with music that lingered long after they had flown.
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I remember one day most clearly of all.
It was early summer, the air warm upon my skin, the forest heavy with the scent of wildflowers. I had wandered deeper than before, drawn by the promise of some hidden glade, some secret place where no foot but mine had ever trod.
I came at last to a clearing, a place where the birches gave way to open sky, and there the ground was thick with flowers — white and yellow and pale blue, swaying in the breeze like a sea of petals. Bees hummed from blossom to blossom, and dragonflies darted above, their wings catching the sun.
I stood at the clearing's edge, and in that moment, I felt as if I had found the heart of the world. The birches stood guard around it, tall and still, and the sky above was endless and blue, and the wind carried the scent of earth and bloom and distant rain.
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I write these memories, and outside my window the birches of Lake Siljan answer with their soft sighing. I hear their leaves, and I hear the forest of my childhood in their voice.
Even now, after all the deserts and jungles, the mountains and seas I have crossed, that birch forest lives within me. It was my first horizon, my first wilderness, my first love.
And it taught me what every forest, every place of wild beauty has taught me since:
That the world does not belong to us. We belong to it.
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I pause, laying down my pen. The wind has shifted, carrying the scent of pine through the open window. The sun glints upon the lake, and the birches sway, their leaves turning silver in the light.
I close my eyes, and for a moment, I am there again — a boy beneath the birch trees, the world new and wide bef
ore me, the horizon calling, always calling.
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