It’s not merely a tree

Facebook “Memories” are a useful way for me to find out what I was posting on the platform on one date. Sometimes one or more are really interesting, most often they’re not, but either way, they’re presented to me without me having to do anything. I’ve found that very useful for this blog because they often inspire new blog posts. Today is the first time it reminded me too late—except, maybe it wasn’t.

Thanks to a FB “Memory” today (up top), I found our that a year ago today—April 20, 2023—I posted a photo of the same tree I shared a photo of yesterday, and from pretty much the same angle. I didn’t remember that I did that, which means I don’t have a photographic memory (you’re welcome). I also didn’t remember that I posted a blog post a year ago today, too, a post that included the two photos in the “Memory”. Obviously there’s no particular reason I should or would remember a blog post from a year ago, and even though I knew that the tree had “been in many of my photos over the past 4+ years”, I didn’t see a need to look through 4+ years of blog posts to look for them.

This could’ve been a story about a FB “Memory” letting me discover that I shared very similar photos of the same tree one year and one day apart, and if that was all there was to it, I may have shared the discovery on my personal Facebook—and, in fact, I did, adding “I see that last year the tree had also lost leaves mostly from the same side as this year, though fewer of them. Guess the prevailing winds might come from that side.” All of of which is at least a little bit interesting, but I doubt I’d ever have blogged about it, too—until I scrolled through the rest of today’s “Memories”.

It turns out, this day has been a significant day for me over the years (some of the other “Memories” are at the bottom of this post).

Seven years ago today, we’d been living in South Auckland for only a couple months, and I shared one of those answer-some-question memes (not one that identity thieves supposedly use), and I said that my favourite place to be was with Nigel.

Six years ago today, Nigel and I were still in Clarks Beach, and I’d just had my annual flu jab. I said that “My arm is kinda itchy and bumpy where I got my flu jab. That’s why I don’t like jabs. Not dying from preventable disease is why I love jabs.” That’s still true, of course, and why I’m in the process of getting my latest jabs between now and June.

Four years ago today, the government announced that the first Covid lockdown was ending a week later by moving down an Alert Level to Level 3, the first of those. I’m pretty sure it was stricter than later versions of Level 3, which is why I called it “Lockdown Lite”. Level 3 eventually got the nickname “Lockdown with takeaways”.

But four years ago today I was living alone in Hamilton, though still with all three dogs, with whom I’d shared that first Covid lockdown that would downgrade a few days later. Nigel and our cat were missing.

A year ago today, it was just me and Leo, and my attention was captured by a tree—a tree!—and not any infectious diseases or preventive measures related to them, and not even by my changed life. Yesterday, it was that tree again, and a focus entirely on my current ordinary life.

I realised that today’s Facebook “Memories” gave me pretty much the clearest look at the arc of my life I’ve ever seen in those daily memories, and that was mainly because of the tree photo: I might not have noticed my story’s arc otherwise. I think that the arc of our life stories is always visible if we look, and looking can tell us a lot about our path and how we got where we are in our current lives.

Everything in life is connected—our lives, our life stories, and how they connect to others and their stories. All we have to do is be willing to SEE when we look. Apparently, even a tree can help with that.

It’s the connections, then, the fact that Facebook so clearly showed me the path of change my life took over the past seven years. So much has changed over that time, and so much will change in the future, too, and documenting all of that is actually the whole point of having a personal blog.

So, the coincidence of posts about a tree ended up in a blog post after all. That and a lot more.