Legible scars of past taps connect present tappers to long-gone strangers

Evidence

And so with drill in hand we circle our trees searching out just the right spot, three feet up, on a smooth face. Lo and behold, there are scars of past taps long healed over, made by whoever had left those sap buckets in our loft. We don’t know their names or their faces, but our fingers rest right where theirs had been and we know what they too were doing one morning in April long ago. And we know what they had on their pancakes. Our stories are linked in this run of sap; our trees knew them as they know us today. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 219

Categorization

• XREF: The healed tap-scar as a text left on the tree’s body that links generations recalls the trees-as-infrastructure essay (living root bridges, bark cloth as living architecture recording human use over time).