Kathy and Connie are gone

 and then they're not

people are there, and then they're not,

two former colleagues were fully there with me, and then we lost them,

I visited one in her local assisted living home in the last year,

marveled at how "with it" Kathy Harris was,

of the marvelous view out her window

of the nature she loved so much,

got her to sign her permission to use the CFS story

she wrote for me and our book, Callings and Answers,

when invited the last few years, she has visited CFS

for a meal, a sharing of a middle school production,

her story for the book was of how thankful she was of her time at Friends,

a year ago I pressed another special colleague, Connie Toverud,

to write and share her story of her and CFS,

in the dark days of January this year in snowy Norway,

she defeated self-doubt and hesitancy

and wrote beautifully of the best of her

revealing itself within the challenge of being on staff in the upper school,

when she read the collected stories in Callings and Answers,

she emailed me that she "cried and cried" after reading it all,

deeply moved by the collective wisdom and experience expressed in those pages,

her own story told of finding herself and her gifts at CFS,

that in her latter decades in Norway

she was called to be there for whomever found her and needed her,

she answered by hearing them, seeing them, connecting with them,

people are there, and then they're not, 

now Kathy and Connie are gone.

by Henry H. Walker

October 30, ‘25

our ginkgo

 

a golden-yellow pillar

my wife bonded with the ginkgo tree long ago when she was a child

 as she walked the streets of Glasgow, Kentucky, going to and from school:

mesmerized by the story her third grade teacher recounted,

how it was saved from extinction by monks in China,

unlike all other trees in its family,

those monks invested their lives to hold the sacred,

that which pulls us out of the normal, the mundane,

and pushes us to get real,

to connect with the "unseen world,"

a deeper reality with which we need to engage,

they must have seen this tree,

the only of its kind that still survived

and tended it, nurtured it, effected its survival,

we planted a double-trunked ginkgo

in our yard over 40 years ago,

it now is dominant in our heart, and in our yard,

when the growing season is ending,

its leaves don't just go gently into the night of winter

but rather slowly ascend into the transcendence

of releasing themselves into golden yellow,

while the oaks around are still green

or resigning themselves to a crinkly brown,

the ginkgo marshals its last hurrah

and slowly, inexorably morphs

into a green-tinged yellow pillar,

shouting "I was! I am! I will be!"

by Henry H. Walker

October 30, ‘25