It was only yesterday that I last climbed
this tree and ate the rich rimy fruit frosted with a Christmas snow.
And yet, could it have been yesterday? It was storming, and I clung here
in the swirling snow and heard the wild ducks go over in their hurry
toward the bay. Yesterday, and all this change in the vast treetop
world, this huddled pond, those narrowed meadows, that shrunken creek! I
should have eaten the persimmons and climbed straight down, not stopped
to gaze out upon the pond, and away over the dark ditches to the creek.
But reaching out quickly I gathered another handful,--and all was
yesterday again.
I filled both pockets of my coat and climbed down. I kept those
persimmons and am tasting them to-night. Lupton's Pond may fill to a
puddle, the meadows may shrivel, the creek dry up and disappear, and old
Time may even try his wiles on me. But I shall foil him to the
end; for I am carrying still in my pocket some of yesterday's
persimmons,--persimmons that ripened in the rime of a winter when I was
a boy.
High and alone in a bare persimmon tree for one's dinner hardly sounds
like a merry Christmas. But I was not alone. I had noted the fresh
tracks beneath the tree before I climbed up, and now I saw that the snow
had been partly brushed from several of the large limbs as the 'possum
had moved about in the tree for his Christmas dinner. We were guests at
the same festive board, and both of us at Nature's invitation.
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