Growth Rings

by: ashley j.j. white

published: 12/28/2025

A girl with more fingers than years

pats around the base of a ponderosa pine seedling

just like he showed her—

gentle but firm.

This is not the first or final thing

they’ll plant together but it’s the one that will last.

“And now, we wait,” he says,

hands on hips, face proud.

“How long will it take?” she asks,

leaning down to brush her cheek

against the young and soft pastel needles.

He smiles and says,

“Good things take time.”

And so, there on the sloped lawn

of 631 Canterbury Drive,

quietly and asking for nothing but rain,

a conifer grows. Slowly, slowly.

Urgency is religion for a child

and she soon loses interest.

The scriptures call her away to other, faster things.

Water slides and swing sets don’t ask her to wait.

The tree is stalwart, though, and unlike her bicycle,

immune to rust.

Roots tendril through soil, staking and claiming.

Above ground, an animate shadow stretches and shifts,

an unwitting narrator,

a clock, a map, a calendar.

The tree is already taller than her

by the time she notices.

And by then she looks down upon the head of her own mother

and understands, now, at the base of this

towering thing she once held in her own tiny hands,

how strange that feels.

And in turn, not yet but inevitably,

her son will outgrow her.

The looming pine, the closest thing to immortality

we’ll ever find,

dwarfing them all in the end.

The cycle repeats, spirals.

Growth rings,

echoes.