Now you see it was always there.

                        William Stafford, "Toward The End"

For years now I have passed by it, taking the road north through a hundred fifty miles of farms and fields, and in corn as far as I can see the gnarled old oak, one side partly bare no matter the season, lightning-struck perhaps, but oaks are hard and hard to kill.  And I wonder what kind of man had come to clear the land for farm and field and left the tree where he found it.

                                oak leaves and sparrows

                                the light passing between them

                                just before sunset

It would have made good lumber for beams, lintel and threshold, barn rafters and the smaller limbs for fence posts and rails.  Something in the man, hard too in a hard place, softened his resolve to put to use all that he had come into the care of, the oak having a purpose that only now I have come to understand . . .

                                   homecoming

                                   one country road

                                   after another

how we need to be grounded by something that came before us and will endure after we have gone; how once, and for some few of us still, making a life is to be rooted deeply in our one place; that for the time we are here we enter into each day with one foot in the past - our own and the ones received from others - keeping it alive as we do the work of the present; each year's corn, the old oak and the new leaves.