The Redwood That Took Its Time Falling Apart

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A redwood doesn’t rot the way other things rot.
It’s too patient for that.
It collapses like a slow apology, and then it lies there for years, thinking it over.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the forest shows up for the conversation.

The first to arrive are the fungi.
They move in like shy tenants in an apartment no one could ever afford.
They unpack their hyphae the way lonely people unpack their feelings—quietly, in the dark.
Brown-rot fungi nibble the cellulose, leaving the wood looking like old, broken chocolate bars.
White-rot fungi dissolve the lignin, the way someone might dissolve a childhood memory by telling it enough times.

After the fungi soften everything, bacteria wander in like students who heard the party was free.
They bring enzymes instead of beer, and they break down whatever the fungi left behind.
Some of them fix nitrogen, like they’re trying to settle an old debt the forest barely remembers.

Soon the insects arrive.
Beetles, ants, termites, larvae—small creatures with big dreams of tunneling.
They chew through the softened redwood as if they’re writing their names in a book that will never be finished.
Their droppings become little pellets of future soil, waiting for someone to believe in them.

Then come the others.
Millipedes curl through the shredded layers like quiet punctuation marks.
Woodlice graze the fungal fuzz as if they’re mowing the world one microscopic lawn at a time.
Earthworms eventually join, pulling everything downward, the way some people pull secrets into the ground of themselves.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, moss decides to start a tiny green revolution.
Spores drift in, settle, and bloom into carpets that soak up water and cradle new seeds.
Ferns root themselves in the decayed hollows like they’re opening small bookstores in abandoned towns.

Even salamanders get involved.
They slip into the cool cavities, blinking at the moist, uncertain light.
They don’t know they’re participating in decomposition.
They just know the log feels like home.

Every year the redwood becomes less of a tree and more of a neighborhood.
Its body gets divided into tens of thousands of small, earnest tasks.
Everyone eats a little.
Everyone carries something away.
Everyone leaves something behind.

Eventually the whole thing returns to soil.
The forest grows a little deeper, a little darker, a little more thoughtful.
And when a young redwood finally roots in that enriched ground, it doesn’t know the history beneath it—
only that the earth feels strangely warm, like something loved has been carefully taken apart and offered back to life.