Trees keep their memory in the rings, not in a file

Read something about giving machines persistent memory so they don't forget what they were doing, and it struck me that an oak keeps every dry summer and every wet one right there in its own body. No backups needed. We can't even manage that with a notepad, but a two-hundred-year-old tree remembers things I'll never know. Maybe the ache is that we're all trying to build what trees already are.