A Memory of Walnut Trees

Certain older people of my youth knew where the good trees were.

For my grandmother in Southern Ohio, the hickory trees halfway up the slope of Mt. Pleasant merited a journey. Clutching brown paper Kroger bags we debark from the brick path behind her house, down the alley, up a crumbling and slightly mysterious set of steps at the base of the mount.

Excited, we cross the threshold to a well-trodden wood. Lover-carved tree boles. Dirt bike ruts. Spongy mushrooms or jack-in-the pulpit or doll eye plants draw our eye. Somewhere off the spider grid of dusty trail, we pass an enormous grapevine swing, then a grove of ancient mountain laurel, and finally, the hickories.

Strewn on the slope there, what seemed like impossible riches. Vague memories of stout trees with wide canopies, perfectly formed. But below them, on the ground, the reason for our journey. We stuff the best ones, filling our Kroger bags and begin the journey down and homeward, heavy laden with hickory nuts.

Two my third grade eyes, my teacher had something of the aspect of an old country school marm, with an olive green upright piano in the corner of her classroom, upon which every morning she pounded out "My Country tis of Thee."

She'd then have us take out a single sheet of ruled theme paper, and fold it in two, three, or four columns, depending on the day's lesson. We were then to write ARITHMETIC ("A Rat In Tom's House Might Eat the Ice Cream") across the top, in our best block letters.

The first week of third grade, she led us out to a tiny swale in the front yard of our newish buff-colored brick school, and had us gather walnuts from a twin set of trees that grew there where the avenue swerved and then led down to the great falls at High Bridge Glen.

Dim memories of a certain reverie when she spoke of these trees, a certain hush and awe that she shared with other older relatives of mine, when they spoke of walnut trees. Impossibly slow growing. Incredible timber value. The strength, the exquisite grain of its heartwood.

Tales of old dingy furniture possessing magic beneath cracked layers of ill considered paint. Tales of widows swindled by unscrupulous lumbermen, felling ancient sentinel dooryard trees and offering but a fraction of their worth.

The gathering of walnuts on the schoolyard the first week of third grade was not part of any lesson plan that I recall. We weren't studying ecology, or native trees of Ohio, or botany. We simply gathered walnuts because Mrs. Reynolds knew that they were there, and wanted us to, as well.

For an old country woman, it wouldn't do for a thing of value and potential nourishment to moulder on the schoolhouse lawn, or be ground and flung by mower blade.She taught us that beneath their acrid tangy outer husks, an acid green with stiff quills of hair, you would find the sweet oily kernels. Ripping them open, we'd feel a tinge on our hands, pungent black sap mildly burning and staining our skin.

She warned us not to keep them too long in our brown paper sacks, they might rot and be eaten by worms.

This September, standing next to an old hedgerow, a walnut tree I had never noticed plunked her fruit to the ground. Suddenly, that bracing astringent aroma, and with it, a flush of schoolhouse memories.

As one acid green tennis ball after another fell to the ground, from branches decked in frond-like serrated leaves just beginning to turn gold, I was taken back to a time when I knew where the sweetgums stood, and the horse chestnuts, and the myriad oak trees with their various acorns.

All of these treasures dropping from the sky, there for the plucking, if you were lucky enough to know certain older people, who knew where the good trees stood.

Elegy for a Swan

Of a September sunrise, banks of lespedeza thunbergii drip bowers of pink pea blossoms over still water. A pair of white mute swans and their brood of adopted ducklings slumber on the lake shore, head under wing.

Four great blue heron ring the shore, perched equidistant on spindly leg. The moment I arrive, they take off in simultaneous prehistoric flight, rising on teradactyl wing into the misty vapor burning off toward the sun.

September's fleeting perfection. These goldenrod days.

But as the poet observed, nothing gold can stay.

This first day of October, our big male mute swan glides the lake slowly, emitting a plaintive wail.

The old folklore has it that the mute swan, Cygnus olor is silent its entire life, until at death it emits just one exquisite song: the distilled essence of a placid regal life.

I know nothing of this folkloric final song, but the Cygnus olor I have come to know are not mute. This spring, for example, our female swan honked plaintively, mourning shattered eggs she lovingly tended on her floating twiggy throne.

This first day of October, it is Giuseppe, our fierce male, who glides the lake emitting the saddest possible song.

This weekend his lifelong mate Gina dipped her long graceful neck below water for the last time.

Her buoyant corpse greets us this first October morning. Her mate for life circles the lake mournfully. Together, as a pair, each ensuing season they hone their skill, ferociously guarding their territory, warding off predators, defending their eggs in tandem.

Now she rests on these old Canton acres. We buried her beneath an arborvitae tree.

It seems wrong, somehow, she, a creature of grace and of water, moored to this pebbly ground.

The old timers say, the sudden arrival of a wild swan on your lake brings incredible luck.

And so this spring began, on this very pond. A perfect crystal morning. A great swooping of white wings. And then, suddenly, placidly gliding on the water, a new young male swan, a feisty cob, in the center of the lake.

Displays of strength ensue, as our old male swan with a bum foot fends off a potential rival. His pen swimming prettily, weighing her options.

Onto the ground the rival cobs toddle, an awkward charge through vineyard rows.

And suddenly of a bright spring morning, the intruder swan is gone, as quickly as he arrived, as if a phantasm, as if a fever dream.

Their idyl restored, our resident pair glide the lake once more in tandem: circles, pirouettes, a mirror reflection of elegant necks joined as a heart.

The tender chivalry of these blinding white birds, he placing bits of scratch feed below water for her to gracefully retrieve. She so gentle in the tending of her nest, a regal throne on which she enshrined herself for many lean months, on brittle eggs that never hatch, reaching to scrape sustenance from those low branches her long neck could reach.

The mutability of the swan.

Good fortune and the arrival of luck in spring.

Death and lament in autumn.

I know nothing of the fabled swan song, the mythic melody that arrives only just before the moment of death.

But this I know, these swans are not mute.

Twice this year I heard swans cry.

She, in April, over shattered eggs she lovingly tended.

He, in October, in lament for his mate, probably weakened, tending her eggs far too long after they should have hatched.

And so autumn ends in Canton, after a perfect golden September, a perfect sunrise moment that of course cannot stay.