I took this photo a couple of weeks ago. (As usual with my photos, it looks much better when you click on it.) The branches of this Linden tree, which is in the yard of a neighboring house, are bare and black now. We can see this tree from our kitchen window. It is a large, beautiful tree, with big leaves. Deciduous trees aren't the rule hereabouts, but there are some that shed their leaves. The linden is both late to bloom and late to shed. So I'm usually surprised to see it still have leaves in November, and then there comes a day when I look out and the branches are bare. I never actually saw the process of it losing its leaves until this year---and I also saw why. The leaves just poured off this tree. It must lose the majority of its leaves in a single day. This was the day.

This Linden has a story, or maybe a myth. When we moved in here, the old woman who lived in that house said her late husband had brought it over from Germany many years before as a seedling hidden in his luggage. Just a few years later she died as well, and her sister moved in. Her sister soon began to decline--we found her crying on our walk one rainy New Year's Eve. She was lost and disoriented. We got her back inside her house, where much of the furniture was overturned. Margaret put her to bed, and I found the phone number of her brother, who said he hadn't seen her in months. Soon after that, she was under the care of a nurse who came every day. She also died a couple of years ago. Now the house is owned by a couple who live in a nearby town and rent it out. They had the tree trimmed back in the spring. The woman said she would have had it cut down and removed if it hadn't cost so much. Margaret told her the story of how it came to be there.

This Linden is likely to be 50 or 60 years old. The Linden tree can live a very long time--nine hundred years or more. It is a famous tree in England (where it's called the lime) and Europe (tilla), particularly sacred in Poland, and in German villages it was the tree under which meetings, ceremonies and other civic events were held, including dancing. Its flowers were used to make a medicinal tea. Perhaps somewhere they still are. I don't think this particular tree is doing very well since it was "trimmed." Until now, it's been one of the best things about this neighborhood--looking out the kitchen window and seeing that magnificent tree. You can tell just by looking at it that it could outlast us all. If it just survives us.