Common

This apple tree (Malus sylvestris) was only two inches high and four leaves old last year at this time. I have it on video tape. We decided to let it grow, once it started because it was so nicely centered in the planting area next to the porch. Many believe that the European crab apple is the original native species from which this huge variety of cultivated domesticated temperate tree species came. This one has shot straight up into the air this summer. During July and August, when it was about half as high as it is today, it was infested with mites of some kind, which were in turn eaten by black ants. Originally, I thought the black ants were eating the top of the tree, but someone insisted that I look closer and I saw them eating the tiny insects that were eating the top of the plant. Did it grow from the seed of the tree across the right-of-way, or in the yard next door? Or did the seed for this tree come from elswhere? This specific tree has a story I may never know; the species has a story as old as human beings, at least. This bearer of wordly knowledge in the Old Testament, as old as civilization. Varieties were brought to Massachusetts by pilgrims in 1626, growing in numbers by 1630. Is this a blue blood descendant? Or is it one of innumerable variations on the theme? Is it a native, an American crab apple? All it tells me this year is that it responds well to regular watering and desires to grow taller. I am hoping it opens next season with some branching. For now it does not seem even to have developed buds. Domesticated plants require an entirely different regimen, having been allowed to flourish at the careful hands of cultivation and husbandry. They are not used to going it alone. Their simple quality of storing for long periods of time gave them early favor with humans. The Romans loved them as we do today. What do I have before me here?

There is a lull afoot. Not that tides have turned, mind you, but the noise is down, somehow, the volume adjusted for human ears. Violence still marks every day in Iraq and an entire city of homeless people wait still for permanent re-location, home or otherwise. The President promised millions, billions to aid all the victims of this "random unexpected natural disaster" as he called it at the outset. One can grant a certain amount of uncertainty in any outcome, and so his rhetorical turn seems successful again. But uncertainty was precisely our point before the war, before the certainty they said they had to move. The problem with this Presidency is no longer episodic, it is chronic. Their episodic responses make them appear even more out of step than we thought. This lull, then, is a careful catching of our collective breaths as we digest everything that has happened since Katrina struck, since Iraq began, since that horrible morning when those fanatical men flew those planes into the sides of the World Trade Centers. The tide has not turned, but it is about to. This quiet you hear, this calm you sense, it is the gathering of something, I think. Justice and civility are as much a part of civilization as the common apple tree; we must turn to what we know and recognize our common ends.