They used to come to me in the early mornings, before the heat settled into the valley like a sleeping dog. The women, mostly, their hands already stained from yesterday’s work, their hair pulled back and their voices low so as not to wake the children still tangled in their sheets. They would pull the leaves from my branches with a gentleness I have never forgotten. Each leaf taken like a small offering, placed into wide wicker baskets that smelled of old summers.
I am a mulberry tree. I stand at the edge of a village in the mountains of Lebanon, and I am very old. Old enough that I have stopped counting the winters. Old enough that the family who planted me, a grandfather whose name no one remembers anymore, only that he wore a red tarbouche and had a habit of talking to his soil, has branched and scattered across the world like seeds in a hard wind.
They fed my leaves to silkworms. That was my purpose once, and I wore it the way a proud man wears his profession. The worms were kept in low wooden trays inside the house, and the sound of them eating, a soft, continuous rustle, like rain on a canvas roof, was a sound this village once knew the way it knew its own heartbeat. The silk they spun became thread, became cloth, became the livelihood of hands that would otherwise have had nothing to hold.
I remember the year the silk market collapsed. I don’t remember the date, I don’t think in dates, but I remember what it felt like. The women stopped coming at dawn. The wicker baskets stayed inside. My leaves yellowed and fell that autumn without being touched, and there was something obscene about it, something that felt like being dressed for a wedding no one came to.
But I stayed.
The village changed. The young men left first, always the young men, going down to Beirut, then further, crossing the water to Brazil, to Ivory Coast, to wherever someone told them there was money and a future that didn’t smell of mulberry and old stone. I watched their mothers stand at the edge of the road long after the cars disappeared, and I wanted to reach a branch toward them, to do something useful with my stillness. But I am a tree. I can only stay.
Wars came the way storms come, with a distant rumbling first, then all at once. I watched things I will not describe. I will say only that I have shrapnel in my trunk that I have grown around, the way bodies learn to live with what has pierced them. My bark is a scar and a record both. Run your hand along it and you are reading a history no book has written.
What no one tells you about being old and rooted is that you are always being left behind. You watch everything move, the children grow and go, the houses fill and empty, the road below gets paved and widened, and the village that once breathed around you like a living thing turns slowly into a memory of itself. A few old houses remain. A church. A fountain that no longer runs. And me.
They come sometimes, in summer, the ones who left, or the children of the ones who left. They sit under me with their phones and their foreign accents and they photograph the valley and say how beautiful it is, and it is, and I do not begrudge them their distance. But sometimes one of them, usually someone older, someone who still remembers, will press their palm against my trunk the way you press your hand to the chest of someone you love to feel them still breathing. And in that moment I am not a ruin or a relic or a backdrop for photographs.
I am a mulberry tree in Lebanon and I have held this ground for longer than anyone living can remember. I have fed silkworms and sheltered grief and collected the names of the dead in my rings, and I am, despite everything, still leafing in the spring. Still reaching. Still here.
Lebanon forgets itself sometimes. It forgets what it is made of, not just marble and cedar and the grand things they put on coins, but the small, stubborn, ordinary things. The tree at the edge of the road. The stone wall that somebody’s great-grandmother built with her own hands. The fountain that ran cold and clean before the pipes were cut and never repaired.
I am still here.
I am still speaking.
The question is whether anyone will stop long enough to listen.
