The Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) is a ‘reluctant’ deciduous—that’s how I think of it. Reluctant because it loses its leaves without any colourful fanfare. Leaves slough off in such a way that you think, perhaps it is dying? Even towards the end of winter the trees along the railway line, where they proliferate, still hold onto a few old yellow leaves.
But come Spring they are flushed fully with bright green new leaves— shiny, unblemished, abundant. I notice them as I trudge back from the station on the way home.
This new growth reminds me of my mother. She was Swiss and she once told us of the joy of spotting with her best friend on the way to school the first Spring buds. It was a joy completely foreign to us. We, growing up next to the evergreen of the north suburban Sydney bushland, didn’t understand. We had never lived through the snowy, grey and foggy, early dark, cold winter days and long nights of Luzern. And even after as a young adult I had lived through such a European winter I didn’t understand because somehow this was something that happened there, a somewhere else place where things were, of course, different.
But this year walking home seeing those leaves I felt joy.
