Baseball

This white ash (Fraxinus americana) has begun its colorful turn - purplish and yellow, as if gleeming. This one is a sapling compared to the 50 foot giant in my neighbor's yard that no doubt seeded it. The white ash is known in the Carolinas as "autumn purple." Its summer leaves are attractive as well, a silvery green, pinnately compound leaf cluster. But the white ash is perhaps best loved for its wood. White ash has a very strong resistence to stress (it doesn't break easily). It is, however, at the same time relatively, even absolutely, light weight. Strong and light, white ash is the favored wood for baseball bats and hockey sticks and other wooden sports equipment. You could make dozens upon dozens of baseball bats out of the giant mother tree in front of my neighbor's house. The one pictured here will need another century to reach those heights, and much more canopy space before it is done. White ash have five to nine leaves per pinnate cluster, but usually produce seven. The bark gets furrowed and thick as the tree gets older and it seems to continue to produce leaves and branches even when it has stopped adding any height. The oldest white ash in my community, planted along with the factories more than a century ago, have large dead branches reaching into the air at their tops and their living branches grow in thickets below, producing and storing energy in ancient roots for the season ahead. The old trees are symbols of persistence. The one pictured here turns for its fiteenth or twentieth time, grown in the tangle of neglected land between properties, preparing for winter. White ash lose their lower branches as they grow, leaving behind a thick knot-free trunk. They are favored in cultivated yards for their speckled shade, and favored by all birds in this neighborhood for the perches provided by the many many branches they grow.

I have looked at the giant white ash a hundred times since first setting eyes on them more than a year ago, but today when I noticed that this one on my right-of-way was turning this beautiful purple color and I realized that purple in fall was one of its defining characteristics and I looked up into the upper reaches of the giants and saw the same purple I realized that several large trees I knew were the same species. We can often be surrounded by concrete things like the white ash giants, and we can even notice these things in passing, and still never really know what they are. But they are not not there, even if not noticed by us. The giant trees, for instance, grew for more than a century before I was even born, my noticing them today did not bring them into existence. Facts and truth, I think, are the same way. They grow sturdy edifices, reach against gravity into the air, and persist beyond their years. They can be denied or go unnoticed, but they cannot be made not there. This is one of those rules that gives me solace in these days of Bush.