A Mother Who Was Once a Child Herself

I can't imagine anyone who once planted a seed standing under a towering tree of Persimmon and wishing and hoping that the tree could revert to the seed it once was. When I stand under my Persimmon tree, the one that I watered, pruned and protected from pests, I don’t often think longingly about that seed. I lean my back against the thick trunk, gaze up through the deep green canopy that holds the hanging fruit, and remember how many seasons have passed. 

I can remember how it felt to pick the first Persimmons many, many years after I had planted her. I remember that she still stood small back then. She was mighty then too but frail in comparison to the tree that cradles me today. I think of the first sign of her sprout stretching from the ground. I think of the pride and patience that I felt caring for an ancient infant. I think tenderly on how I sheltered the stretching sapling as it snaked its way towards the sun. And now, standing below this magnificent mother, a mother who was once a child herself, and bathing in the shade of her body, I remember, but I don't yearn for anything before this exact moment. 

When I first held her, I felt the force contained in her, and I knew that her seeded form was not meant to be permanent, but a transient vessel that held the possibility for what is now my Persimmon tree. This towering plant was once a shiny pebble full of the charged potential energy of a life that has not quite begun. 

I think of what a shame it would have been had I loved and adored her potential so much that I had been afraid of her growing out of that state. Imagine if I had seen that seed, shiny, small and smooth, and loved her innocence so much that I had frozen her in that moment in time- a moment in which she could have been anything because she was still nothing at all. 

I´d really rather not imagine it, because the thought of paralyzing something that’s meant to constantly transform is too grim. It makes me think about this desperate grip that we have around preserving ephemeral versions of things. Preserving transient versions of ourselves. Be it our youth, or our past dreams, or lost loves, or past moments of innocence that could never have been retained. 

So often we wish we could freeze the unfreezable and try to deny the inevitability of endings and transformations. We place the seed in a box, and think that if we keep it in the closet it will survive until we can plant it at the perfect time, in the perfect yard of the perfect house to grow the perfect seed into a towering tree. So the years pass and the shiny seed sits, motionless, with no soil to germinate into and no nutrients to absorb. 

If there’s one thing that I would regret at eighty years old it would be not having grown my tree. I think if I was old and frail and destined to go I would lament looking into the box where it sat for decades. And I would know deep in my aching heart that a box was no place for a tree. And I would go silently, and hopefully remember that feeling, so that hundreds, thousands, or millions of years later, or whenever I ate a Persimmon again, something would take over my body to dig a hole. 

Maybe that’s what happened this time around.

Maybe the last lifetime left an aftertaste of Persimmon and regret on my tongue. And maybe that’s why I moved with the instinct of an ancient matriarch when my hands stirred the soil to bury the seed. And maybe I learned my lesson the last time, because this time, in the center of my house stands a beautiful and bountiful tree, and I know that at eighty years old I will have somewhere to lay. I tended her as she stretched and now she shades me as I shrink. And when the time comes she will hold me and drop leaves over my skin and say goodbye with soft brushes of grief and gratitude. To raise an ancient entity as someone who is nothing more than flesh and blood is to only be a witness to its beginning. 

Time will pass and she will grow, and grow, and grow. I will be long gone but she will remain. She will knock bricks out of place and disrupt the neatly packed soil around her. She will be huge, she will be old, and she will be glorious. And season after season she will be where critters take shelter and feast, and her fruit will be as sweet as ever. And if anyone were to ask my Persimmon tree what makes her fruit so sweet and her harvests so rich,

I think she would tell them about me.