CityView Magazine

10 June 2021 MCFADYEN'S MUSINGS All trees die BY BILL MCFADYEN A er eight solid months of too much rain, it was hard to believe how badly we needed some. Yet when it quit raining in March and the trees starting drinking in April, we quickly transitioned from mud to dust. Standing just outside the garage, I was frying fresh catfish chunks in peanut oil for my son's guests inside. e southwest sky that I was facing churned from gray to black. e radar on my phone told me what I already knew from having watched the sky from that very spot for the last 30 years. is storm was going to get us. If the clouds had formed a little to the right, then it might have missed us to the north. When they formed in the gap between the bird feeder and the pasture pines, though, I knew we were getting wet. is one was coming fast. When the front overtook the backyard, Susanna was in the chicken pen trying to teach the month-olds to go up the ramp and into the new house she had just built them. Apparently, they were the clutch that we had heard about, being too dumb to come out of the rain. By the time Susie ascended on to the back porch, she was drenched, overtaken by the curtain of precipitation. e rainwater was not what drove her inside though. It was the violent gust of wind followed by the sound of trees coming down that inspired her sprinting retreat. I had had just enough time to get the fryer rolled inside the garage and to get the door down enough to keep the blowing rain out of the hot oil. Down it cascaded, ending the year's first dry spell. Several days later, I was putting away the season's turkey decoys in the Handy House in the lower end of the property, that part of our land that mostly held the world together. It jutted out into a peninsula between one neighbor's creek and the other's irrigation pond. It was where I kept the tractor implements and a pyramid of leover bricks. e only thing in that part of the property that really intrigued me was the wild persimmon tree. I found it one fall aer I had parked the trailer inside the wood line. I had hitched up and pulled forward so as to load the Kubota and bush hog. All over the boards were over-ripe persimmons. eretofore, I had not noticed this fruit tree swallowed up in that tangle of understory and dominated by one obnoxious, over-reaching sweet gum. To me, that persimmon was like buried treasure. Granddaddy turned me on to persimmons, like he did to so many other things that foundationally matter to me. He showed them to me during one boyhood September when they were still on the tree, but oranging up like they do. He said that when they got so, they were the sweetest thing that grew on those sand ridges of his homeplace on what is now Fort Bragg. His family used to make pies with them. He also said fall persimmons (and sweet potatoes) were what they fed to imprisoned possums to "clean them out" and make the meat more fit to eat. "Don't eat persimmons until they are so though," he warned. "e alum will turn your mouth inside out." I tested one too early once, and he was right. It was like a dentist's tube suctioning out all the spit in my mouth. at gum tree was colossal. My persimmon did not have a chance against it. No amount of strategic cogitating on my part resulted in enough courage to inspire me to cut it. Too many power lines. Too close to other people's stuff. Too late in my life to muster that much energy voluntarily. So, I just tried to trim a path to the sky on the lower gum limbs such that my persimmon could get its share of sunlight. I am contributorily negligent in its sudden death, I suppose. By cutting a path for it to the sky, it leaned too much to sustain itself against that first blast of summer storm, the one that drove Susanna out of the chicken pen and my deep fryer into the garage. e crack that she had heard behind her was my persimmon. I found it on that subsequent trip to back of All trees die at some point. Along the way, they hopefully drop a few seeds that sprout perpetuation. Something worthwhile left behind. Something for which to gaze forward.

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