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