Witness Root
The farmhouse didn’t fall all at once.
It slumped. It exhaled. It forgot itself piece by piece. Boards softened, nails loosened their grip, windows surrendered to wind and birds and the slow boredom of weather. The land reclaimed what had only ever been borrowed.
The tree never moved.
It stood on higher ground, roots wrapped deep in soil that remembered plows, footsteps, voices calling names that no longer answered. Rings stacked inside its trunk like chapters no one thought to read. Seasons passed. Ownership changed. Then stopped changing altogether.
The tree watched roofs cave in.
Watched fields return to wild agreement.
Watched the house become an outline, then a rumor, then nothing but a shape the grass avoided.
No one asked the tree to remember. It did anyway.
The cache rests where sightlines converge. Above the ruin. Near the living. Close enough to feel the weight of what was, far enough to survive it. You don’t find it by searching the farmhouse. You find it by standing where time paused long enough to observe itself.
To retrieve it, you must look down.
The house is gone.
The work is gone.
The lives are gone.
The tree remains.
Take nothing but the understanding that endurance doesn’t require movement. Sometimes it only requires roots, silence, and the willingness to outlast memory.