The Swallows and The Sycamore

Short Story by Amber Platel + Interview

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I will admit, I am glad to have you back. I’ve been lonely without you, though I should have been used to your absence, to the absence of everything, I suppose. I have been here forever, long before the tree before me released the winged seed which bought me to this spot; long before you arrived.

The building that houses you was built around me. I heard them talking of destroying me, my knotted roots posing a threat to the foundations that it sits on. I was protected. My antiquity saved me. But a tree holds in it every scar and trauma, and that threat is remembered in my growth rings, a bruise that never materializes can still hold pain.

For a long time, I hated the building; it obscured my light and cut me off from the other trees. During construction, everything was so loud that nothing visited me. The swallows that had been passing down the nesting spot in the crook of my elbow for generations did not return in May, and by the end of June, there was no flurried bustle of chirps and no flutter of previously egg-confined wings. I missed the company. The grey squirrels were deemed pests and were evicted from my trunk, and the spraying of pesticides was damnation for the woodlouse and bagworm that had welcomed visitors only months before.