Creek Running North

How odd it is to sink roots into this soil, bit by imperceptible bit. How odd it is to have this place seep into me as insensibly. It seems short months ago we got here, one more move in a lifetime spent moving, and yet trees I planted are already taller than I am. One of them is taller than the house.

I spoke today with someone who told me of regrets, of losing track of a friend for ten long years. How can one put friendships aside for so long? Weeks stretch to months, to years, and then you realize you have lived an entire life without them. I got in touch with my friend Greg after 15 years apart. Fifteen years! And we were lucky. Our friendship had survived.  It was as if no time had passed save for his receding hairline, my proceeding waistline, and a few more stories collected, songs written. We learned our lesson that day. We looked at one another and promised not to let the time slip quite so far.

That was eleven years ago. I don’t know where he is now.

Each year a spurt of growth and season of rest, and my trees root more firmly into this little hill. This week I took a chunk of our bedrock, sun-dry and crumbling, and placed it in a saucer, poured a bit of water over it. The rock absorbed every drop.  The rock lets my trees’ roots breathe and drink. Roots follow faults in the rock, slowly widen. Clefts appear in the earth. Some centuries from now the last riven rock that was this hill will wash down the creek, feed the mitten crabs in the bay.

It is a dizzying pace. How many cords of wood have grown from maple samaras I plucked distracted from the eaves of my father’s garage, sprouted and transplanted? Each tree planted a decision, each tree not planted was likewise a decision. Seven years in that house, eight years in the house where Zeke first joined us, and before too long our time here will outstrip both of them. I did not expect to settle in a place like this, neither farm nor city, too wild for suburb and too paved for wilderness. Yet I have grown a cord of wood here by now, or more, and the white-tailed kite I watched hunting tonight over the marsh, backlit by flame-red clouds, might be three, perhaps five generations removed from those who first stalked us uselessly when we moved in. Each year a year not spent somewhere else, and though I have desires enough to fill a dozen lives it is proving difficult to fit one life’s worth into this one life. I have lived by this bay for 25 years, all of them spent not living in Flagstaff, or Missoula, or Abiquiu.

Each door opened is a hundred closed.

Five years ago I planted a persimmon, Diospyros kaki, food of the gods. The tree is of the variety “Fuyu,” with non-astringent fruit that can be eaten out of hand once the color is right. We have eaten gallons of cherries for the last few years, and the Asian pear is again so heavy-laden the trunk is bending, and though I planted the persimmon in the same hour as the pear and cherry it has waited until this year to set fruit. When the fruit was thimble-sized the tree held a hundred persimmons, but there were choices to be made. Two-thirds of the fruit dropped a few weeks ago. The dropped fruit lies mummified, dried perfect and unblemished, on the flagstone below. Decisions must be made! If the tree tried to mature all that fruit, all that fruit would ripen poorly. Better to accomplish a few things well, and we will eat two dozen healthy persimmons in October, unless the squirrels get there first.

But today I looked down at the dropped dried fruit for a while, looked at it with longing, the imagined flavor lost and lingering on my tongue, a sweetness that could have been but for the opening of other doors.