Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world
~W.S. Merwin “Elegy for a Walnut Tree” from The Moon Before Morning 

We bought this old farm over thirty years ago:
the Lawrence family’s “Walnut Hill Farm”~
a front yard lined with several tall black walnut trees
brought as seedlings in a suitcase from Ohio
in the ought-1900’s.

These trees have thrived over 100 years on this hilltop farm
overlooking the Canadian mountains to the north,
the Nooksack River valley to the west,
the Cascade peaks to the east,
each prolific in leaves and prodigious in fruit.

In the tallest, we had a treehouse built high up
where the view through the limbs and leaves
takes our breath away: for only a little while
we are perched above and beyond this world,
and that never fails to make us smile.

A book of beauty in words and photography, available for order here: