The seeds were obviously squash of some sort. Creamy, a little sticky with resin, a strange gift to show up in a clump of rotten wood at the heart of a tree. We spent time over coffee reconstructing the narrative of those seeds, remembering back to a particular summer, twenty-five years ago, when I’d staked out a vegetable plot, 25 x 25 feet, and tried to improve the rocky soil by digging in seaweed and anything else I could get my hands on: a bucket of chicken manure from neighbours, mulch from under the big-leaf maples, sandy run-off at the bottom of our steep driveway. Our two small sons played in the dirt that eventually was raked and seeded to what passes for a lawn, enhanced with wild moss. I planted pumpkins that summer, wanting the beauty of their orange globes to remind me of harvests. The plants had spread out with wild abandon, a few of the pumpkins forgotten under salal beyond the boundary of the vegetable garden. What an opportunity for squirrels. And a few seeds tucked into a likely crevice, fresh and raw, in the trunk of a handy tree to provide a winter meal were forgotten, maybe after the tasty fungus had already been knocked off and eaten, forgotten as the tree healed around the small rent.

I planted the seeds and three germinated within a week. I transferred them to the vegetable garden once it was warm enough and I’d love to say that they thrived and produced a huge crop of pumpkins (for they were in fact pumpkin seeds), a testament to my green thumb and the seeds’ inherent fertility. The truth it, they didn’t do much of anything. They grew a little, sent out tendrils to hold fast to the stems of kale. A few blossoms, a few tiny green pumpkins which never matured.

I was disappointed — but too busy with jam-making and canning to linger too long on this failure. And I decided that the true magic was in the finding. That hidden in the heart of a tree was unexpected treasure, a mnemonic to take us back to our beginning days on this property, when our garden grew beyond us, when we carved the thick skin of pumpkins into faces on the night of All Hallows, lit from within by a short length of candle, to stay off the spirits that crossed the boundary between the living and the dead.

How the time passes quickly so that a sapling — I just looked out to see it… — leaves a trunk thirty-eight inches across when felled, its years, the weather contained in a narrative of rings. A seed waited for twenty-five years inside that tree to have its chance to become a pumpkin, however small and green the result, and the children who crouched under the limbs to while away a hot summer day have become scholars and lovers, their lives elsewhere except for a few days a year when they walk the old paths, sit by the fire that continues to draw us to it each morning, a fire started with split shakes of the original roof, now silver with age, while blue metal replaces those shakes. How time passes, how everything we knew is stored in our own bodies — the dull ache of sleepless nights, the sharp yearning for love, the sorrow of these empty rooms once filled with children laughing, fighting; their books, their toys, their filthy socks and tiny overalls. One boy still sits under the original nestbox (though I know it’s not possible, he lives in Ottawa) with his notebook, trying to sketch the swallow nestling that hangs out the opening, saying, — Don’t fall out, Parva! Be careful. And I stand out among the trees, under stars, while the moon thins and fattens, turns soft gold in autumn, hangs from the night’s velvet in February, draws me out on summer evenings to drink a glass of wine while owls fill the darkness with that question: — Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all? It was always me and I never once minded.