There isn’t much to look at when I do water exercise at an indoor pool, except a hackberry tree visible through the glass doors. This tree stands alone in a large rectangle of grass surrounded by sidewalks. There is nothing else growing here; small plants could hardly withstand the powerful lawnmower that regularly goes up and down the grass. But the hackberry survived. At one time, it was a young shoot of a thing, growing from a seed perhaps carried by the wind or lying dormant in the earth, and grew in spite of whatever lawn care happened. I have never heard of anyone planting a hackberry tree in these parts. They are considered trash trees, which come up unwanted, vilified, pulled up.
Over the years and through countless hours of moving in the water, I have watched the hackberry through its seasons, through the yellowing of fall to the quick leaf-dropping of winter and the tentative first bright greening of spring. The tree reflects the weather around it: in drought its canopy is small and thin and leaves drop early; this year, with ample rain, it spreads a wide circle of thick green. Now, in mid-summer, the tree seems not to be changing; it looks the same every day. But its apparent sameness is illusory. Processes are occurring that will seem to have happened all at once when the leaves turn yellow and orange in two or three months.
A few days ago, I noticed the wind shaking the leaves and wondered where these winds had been. Did they come from the Sahara Desert, along with the winds that recently caused Paris to reach 108 degrees? Did they come across the Gulf of Mexico and pick up droplets of water that had been recycling around the earth for eons? Did they contain oxygen that had been released when the first green things appeared on earth? How much carbon dioxide did these winds carry? If we knew, would we heed their warning?
Like the hackberry, the earth may seem changeless at a given moment, while all the time it is not. Something is happening out of our sight—just as my body, as it moves in the water, is changing out of mine. Would that I, and we, might summon the hackberry’s resilience.
