Memory seed.

My parents’ woods.  Shade, creek, flowers, vines, fences.  These have always been there in my memories.  In the right season, we would go and look for the pink lady’s slipper orchid; at other times, we would simply walk for the sake of walking.  Fifty acres, mostly wooded, spread out beneath our feet, filled with jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium, honeysuckle, and a wealth of other wildflowers.

On one occasion, I remember a man going with us who did not normally go.  I think he was my uncle.  I know that I was too young to know why he was there, since he did not live with us.

The walk was… how long?  I’m not sure, because I’ve forgotten most of it.  The only fragment of that day that has survived was near the end of the hike.  We were walking uphill, approaching the back of my father’s barn.  My uncle was in front of me.  He and my father paused for a moment to talk, and as I squinted up at them against the patches of sun falling through the leaves, my uncle bent and scooped something from the ground.  He turned and extended his hand to me, smiling.  I took what he held and looked down at it, puzzled.

It was round and lumpy.  Half of it shone in the sunlight, smooth and polished like my mother’s table.  The other half was rough, pebbly, and a little softer to the touch.

“It’s an acorn.”  He smiled and handed me two or three more.

He turned to continue walking, and the memory ends.  I remember that later I put the acorns with my toys, and when the caps came off as the acorns dried, I used them as hats or bowls for some of my little figures.

The main thing I know is that every time, every time I touch or hold an acorn… most of the time when I just see an acorn… I think of that man, my uncle, the uncle who died when I was so young that I have only that one memory of him.  The uncle who put acorns in my hand for the first time, who puts in my father’s eyes almost the only tears I’ve ever seen there.

Thank you, Uncle Raymond, for these gifts.

Many of those trees were my friends creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. — Treebeard

Each kindly act is an acorn dropped
In God’s productive soil;
You may not know, yet the tree shall grow
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox 

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