Last week, as the 17½ inches of rain soaked into the sandy soil, I went outside to gather the branches that had scattered themselves across the yard and was surprised to find that acorns had already started falling. It is August. The temperature is still regularly in the 90s. The leaves are all still green.
The trees from which those acorns fall are sawtooth oaks. They are twenty years old now. They are tall and full and anchored in the sandy soil just outside my back door. Every time I look at them I get a jolt of perverse pleasure as I remember someone telling me, when they were spindly seedlings, that they would never grow, never live. That someone was wrong. About a lot of things, as it turns out.
Speaking of lots of things, there are a lot of things to like about sawtooth oaks (the shade, the breeze they draw in summer, the crunch of fallen leaves in autumn), but my favorite thing is the acorns. Sawtooth oak acorns are as big as scuppernong grapes and their caps are curly. When the caps fall off – and they always do – they look a lot like buckeyes. They roll around in your hand like marbles, heavy and smooth. Every year at least a couple handfuls wind up inside the house in a bowl just because they are so beautiful.
Usually by the time I notice them, so have the deer. The dirt surrounding the roots will look as though it has been turned up by a Lilliputian plow and I will have to work hard to find acorns that haven’t been nibbled already. This year, though – maybe because the deer have been pushed to higher ground by Tropical Storm Debby – the acorns are mounded up in pristine piles awaiting my admiration.
I have always thought of the sawtooths as twins – fraternal not identical, not mirror images of each other, but close. When the acorns fall it is impossible to tell where the fruit of one tree stops and the other begins. There is simply one wide blanket of mahogany orbs.
That changes today. As I continue shuffling my feet, the sound of acorn against acorn reminiscent of the maracas in second grade rhythm band, I see a pile of acorns that are different – tiny, minuscule, smaller than a garden pea. I stop, stare, look around. All the acorns under this tree are of the diminutive variety.
For the next couple of minutes I turn in circles taking in the contradiction: the two trees have, after 20 years of making the same kind of acorn, produced starkly different ones.
My first thought is to contact one of my biologist friends for an explanation. My second thought is to pull out my phone and Google my inquiry. My third thought is, “I don’t want to know.”
I am generally a very curious person. It is not often that I don’t want to know something. It is not often that I choose ignorance over knowledge. I don’t ever remember saying, to myself or someone else, “I don’t want to know.” In fact, I am generally dismissive of those who are content to embrace obliviousness, but these are strange times.
Houses are flooded and roads are washed out. Friends are displaced and livelihoods are lost. And in the midst of the chaos, there is still death and grief. Which is why, as I continue studying the acorns I realize that it’s not that I don’t want to know. It is that I don’t need to know. For right now, for these liminal days, it is enough to watch and be amazed.
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