Tilia

When I photographed this sapling, which has been growing all summer adjascent to the red oak (Quercus rubra) sapling I transplanted from Somerville, I had an instinctive sense that it might be some kind of hawthorn. I pawed through the tree guide. It is not a hawthorn. It is not an alder. The leaf looked familiar to me, but I couldn't pin it down. Is it a shrub? Is it not part of the tree species identification guide? Wait. Here it is on a well-thumbed page. This is the familiar linden tree, or American basswood, (Tilia americana). Its parent tree was earlier mistaken as a mulberry tree (by me). This common native species will produce flowers one day that will attract bees; basswood flowers, it seems, are the bees' favorite flower. Its wood was used for food boxes and wood fiber (paper). Indians used to weave a sturdy rope out its inner bark. This basswood will grow side by side with the red oak (behind it in the photograph) and one day shade the far corner of my property with drooping branches and that distinctive bee-attracting flower. Above it today, the sky hangs in the first deep cool gray of autumn. It suggests November today, even with green still mostly everywhere and temperatures in the high 60s. Muted sun, a gusting wind. You can almost hear the cackle of settling ice.

Or the cracking and breaking of patience. There are long waits for things and then there's this present set of circumstances. We confuse basswood and mulberry, something I assure you a bee would never do. We call all conifers "pine" and may be able to distinguish oak from maple, but not white from black or red from striped. There is marching death in Iraq as another week begins. Another kind of march this past weekend drew thousands to Washington, but not the millions who should have been there, out of conviction if nothing else. Today he utters the word conservation. I thought I was reading satire. And the days shorten into fall light and the linden tree reaches skyward.