Dodged the bullet for a while…
…but it finally caught up with us.
A while back, the local power company marked our persimmon tree to be cut down. We stalled them, but today is apparently The Day.
I love this tree. It’s very close to a major road, but there used to be a house where the road is now, and the tree was in that house’s front yard. Our side yard was a smaller road then. That was 30 years ago, but I still remember the way the place looked then, and our colorful neighbors. The man who lived there, a saxophonist who played in his wife’s jazz nightclub, built me a badly designed, garishly colored, well-loved sled. The house and sled were bulldozed, but the tree is a reminder of times gone by.
Deer come out of the woods and eat the fallen persimmons in the winter. Sometimes immigrants come and pick them when they’re ripe, although this is the native American variety of persimmon, not the Asian. And every year until very recently, 97-year-old Mrs. Alexander would gather some to make persimmon jam.
I spoke with the young man apparently in charge of the work and told him about the tree’s history. He listened with a furrowed brow and said that they weren’t planning on cutting very much of it, maybe twelve feet… well, maybe six. He seemed sympathetic, so maybe we’ll only be grazed by the bullet after all.