Rings
- Michal Svoboda
- Oct 21, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 9

One day, my grandpa and I were walking through the forest. Back then, I was only waist-high to him. He let me walk barefoot on the moss. It felt cold, but in a pleasant sort of way. We stopped by a stump left behind by a giant tree. The clean, precise cut of a saw was still visible. Grandpa knelt down beside it, brushing away fallen leaves and pieces of bark. He studied the tree rings for a while, then placed his index finger on one of them.
“This is where you were born,” he said. He moved his finger a little closer to the center of the stump. “This is where your mother was born.” A little closer still. “And here is where I was born.” Finally, he placed his finger on the very center. “And this… this was a long, long time ago. Back then, any of us could have been someone completely different.”
I can’t remember why they cut down that tree. Or even what kind of tree it was. In fact, I don’t remember much of that day at all, but I have this feeling that it might have happened like this if grandpa and I had gone to the forest that day. He surely would have let me walk barefoot on the cold moss. And I’m certain that if we had come across a stump like that, he would have been able to read its rings.
Sometimes, I wonder who I might have been when the tree’s trunk was no thicker than a boy’s arm. Was I simply nothing, waiting to become — or was I something long forgotten? If only we had the memory of these trees, a memory that endures across lifetimes.

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