I thank God for our tree. 

It’s no ordinary tree. 

We have quite a few trees in our yard. But this one stands above the others. It’s a black locust, tall and stately. It was already so when we moved in thirty-three years ago. 

Judging by its three-foot girth, it must be near two hundred years old. 

These days, whenever I drive around town, all along the main streets they’ve torn up the former landscape and built glass-and-steel towers, shoulder to shoulder. Major thoroughfares cower under continuous assault by jack hammers, their lanes in constant flux. 

All is change, all the time. Even Heraclitus would weep.

But this old tree: It stood here more than a century before I was born in 1945 and will likely continue in the same old stand long after I am gone. That is, barring a tornado, a lightning strike, or an unfortunate re-zoning.

It’s a living thing that goes on and on.

Although our tree is rooted in front of the house, it towers over the roof, so I can sit in the backyard and watch its canopy. In December you can see its structure—all black limbs, branches, and twigs, reaching upward in a complex pattern against the sky. But in summer it is covered with leaves—compound leaves, each with nine to nineteen three-quarter-inch leaflets arranged on a central stem. They start out green and gradually turn to gold, wind-glittered in a blue sky as summer becomes fall. 

Those leaflets are uncountable. I try to guess their number but cannot. It embarrasses my imagination. 

It should not be a mystery. The main trunk, after all, splits into only two huge limbs. One of these splits in two again a foot higher, and the other splits in two a bit higher up. Each of these four main branches ascends to a point where it splits into four or five still-large branches. At this height, forty feet up, smaller branches erupt from all sides of the larger branches. And each side branch splits and resplits many times and sprouts forth smaller branches from its sides. This goes on and on, until the tiniest twigs, unable to support the weight of a sparrow, burst forth in leaves and leaflets. 

How many leaflets could there be? Millions, I’ll bet. Maye tens of millions, just on this one tree. But I don’t really know. 

I do know that when I gaze up at its majestic form, winter or summer, I feel completed. Whole, bound to a piece of earth. I am in the presence of a living creature not only older, but likely wiser, than I. It has stood there for ages. It has stood the test of time. It survived a tornado twenty years ago that took down an eighty-foot silver maple in our backyard. Who knows what other challenges it has mastered in its decades, its centuries rooted to that spot?

Our daughter and grandchildren come over frequently. I want to grab them by their collars, point upward, and shout, “Look! There it is! Still there! Doing what it always does: basking in the sun, breathing in carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, sucking water from deep underground and spraying it as vapor to moisten our air supply.” But I’m not sure I would really be saying what I mean to say.

It is, after all, a perfectly ordinary tree. Not at all unusual. Most of our neighbors have trees of like age, longevity, and probity supporting the skies above their half-acres. Big old trees live everywhere in our city and state, and most places in our nation and world. 

In earlier days, when I was a young, struggling, bewildered atheist, my late mother-in-law—gentle with my folly but firm in her own beliefs—was the finest theologian I knew. 

“Look at a tree,” she said.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

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