In the backyard of our lake house stands a magnificent, pignut hickory tree. No one knows for sure why the tree is called a pignut hickory other than pig farmers once supposedly used the nuts produced as rooting material for their pigs. But, more about pig nuts in a minute. Regardless of its name, the tree is straight, strong, and 83 feet tall. (With the help of an app on my I-phone, I measured it).
This pignut hickory tree provides our house and property with many practical and esthetic gifts. Those gifts include such things as wonderful, summertime shade and a trunk that can be encircled by the end of a clothesline for drying wet items like swimsuits, beach towels, life jackets.
Our pignut hickory also allows one of its lower branches to support a great tree swing while its branches far higher up support, year after year, a home for a family of squirrels. And the squirrels do not have an exclusive neighborhood. The pignut hickory tree is also an overnight resting spot for countless birds and is – to borrow the title from Shel Silverstein’s classic, truly a “giving tree.”
A giving tree is an apt description not only for the things just mentioned but also because our hickory tree is, in a word, prolific!
Each year, beginning around the third week in July and culminating in early November, the tree drops pig nuts; each one that escapes the jaws of a squirrel or is left alone on the ground can become, over time, another large hickory tree like its parent.
But I have been intervening in the annual hickory pignut cycle. I do this because when left alone the pig nuts mess up the yard and walking on them is painful, not to mention sometimes dangerous. And, because the quarter-sized pignuts are not palatable beyond a squirrel’s palate, there is no culinary value in harvesting them.
So, as I gather up about 37 gallons of pignuts each summer and fall season, I ponder various things – like seasons themselves – while going about the often-daily picking-up-pig-nuts task.
Specifically, I have been thinking of the difficult season of pandemic, division, and polarized dispute over seemingly everything in which we currently find ourselves. It is a painful season and living in it is all too frequently, in a phrase, not pleasant.
In my times of pondering the meaning of this difficult season, the very familiar 3rd Chapter of Ecclesiastes comes to mind. You know, all that biblical prose attributed to “the preacher” about a time to die, a time to plant, a time to pick up stones (perhaps pignuts, too), a time to hate and on and on. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-9).
I think about the traditional interpretation of these verses as an example of an ancient, cynical expression that life is just one big, endless, cycle of things over which human beings have no control. “What gain have the workers from their toil?” I get that. And I have my share of cynicism, anger and sometimes feelings of hatred when I encounter examples of reported political gridlock, conspiracy theories, and all manner of anti-vaxxers’ self-justification as infections spike and people die.
But as I now find myself in about the third week of another pignut gathering season, I am not comfortable with the traditional interpretation of these verses. There must be more than a biblical excuse for contemporary cynicism or angry, caustic heartburn. There must be reason for hope.
The meaning of the text on the various “seasons” encountered as we live our lives – a time to hate, a time to mourn, and on and on – just may be that THE SEASONS PASS! Hard times come to an end. Hateful times come to an end. Times of dying and all manner of suffering come to an end. This is a hopeful word! Particularly when one finds him or herself in a very difficult moment in their individual or our collective lives.
And, as if this were not enough in and of itself, there is more! THE HOPE is that the seasons pass, and life endures, is made richer, and is ever filled – for those whose spiritual resilience enables them to look for it and participate in the mending of things – with greater and greater meaning!
I want to be a part of the mending. I want to be a part of making things better. I want to be a part of what is good and happy and healing and hopeful. Being forever upset and filled with cynical feelings is just too high a spiritual price to pay during the living of our days. There is always reason – good reason – to hope for tomorrow and to work to help make tomorrows possible.
So, the seasons pass. We do not exist just to somehow survive them, or endure them, or angrily accept being defeated by them.
Indeed, and thanks be to God, we are promised that the hopeful spirit thrives, deepens, and even grows more wonderfully despite seasons and SOMETIMES, even BECAUSE of them. It is time to close. I must be on my way to pick up pignuts again and continue to be so very grateful for the hickory tree in our lake house backyard that produces them.