I’m not sure where Mary and her mother lived, but here in my part of Ohio nobody seems to want to buy trees out of residential neighborhood. I had a giant of a tree that started to split some thirty to forty feet in the air; being a good neighbor I decided to have it taken down so it wouldn’t crush the house next door. I figured it would be easy – surely someone would want my giant black walnut tree, right?

Nope. I only was able to get two people to call me back and neither of them had any interest once I told them that it was in my yard. So I was on the hook for a tree removal. The kicker was that I was wrong – even though I have black walnuts all over the house (and in the blades of the lawnmower), this particular tree was a choke cherry. C’est La Vie.

That being said, I really like this week’s poem. The hinge-point for me is the line “But something brighter than money /moves in our blood-” In that one line you know that they’re never going to chop that tree down, that money isn’t everything. I guess that I’m the same way – unless they’re about to fall down and crush someone’s house, my trees are here to stay.

The Black Walnut Tree

My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood-an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don’t do
anything. That night I dream
of my fathers out of Bohemia
filling the blue fields
of fresh and generous Ohio
with leaves and vines and orchards.
What my mother and I both know
is that we’d crawl with shame
in the emptiness we’d made
in our own and our fathers’ backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.

-- Mary Oliver