Shelter in Place, San Francisco, December 11, 2020
We rarely see our gardening neighbor over the fence, and when we do, he is a man of few words. But when, on our walk, we encountered him in front of his house yesterday, Michael was slightly more gregarious. We stood six feet apart, catching up, and I was struck once again by how much time has gone by with little personal news to show for it - a strange slow-down speed-up kind of life. “It is what it is,” Michael said as I looked down at the ginkgo leaves beneath my feet.
I never notice how many ginkgos there are in our neighborhood until they turn bright yellow and drop their leaves, all of them at once. Like the stunning lilacs in Minnesota’s spring, the trees are anonymous until they burst with color on every street. ’Tis the season for the ginkgos to show their stuff and I am glad for it, even if it means that nearly a year has gone by in this calendar half-life we can barely measure and cannot truly quantify. It is December, I remind myself, because he ginkgos are dropping their leaves.