For my birthday, my mother mailed me a package. Open it before it’s rotten, she wrote in a text message, knowing that I tend to delay receiving her gifts. Inside was a pair of earrings, a ziploc bag of rambutans, and two persimmons from the tree outside the house where I grew up. I knew they were from the tree because they were smaller than supermarket persimmons, and they weren’t yet ripe. Let’s take one to the city, Ryan said, it’ll be ready by then. We were going down for a five-day silent retreat.
I sat for five days. Not doing much: cleaning the temple, arranging flowers for the altars, helping in the kitchen. Stretching during the breaks—long, luxurious, unknotting stretches, lining up my body with the banister of the stairs. Mostly I spent the retreat thinking, and trying not to think. At the end of the five days I felt soft, newborn, every feeling cold and luminous, like freshly fallen snow.
When I peeled the persimmon with a knife, it came off in one piece. When I cut the persimmon open, I found there was one seed. Until that moment I had never seen a persimmon seed before, not that I can remember. I’ll try to sprout it, I said.
It’s persimmon season. The fruit grows on a tree that looks similar to other fruit trees—shortish, with thin branches and small pink or white flowers. Unlike apples or pears, persimmons ripen after the first frost, when nearly all the leaves have fallen. The variety my family grows is the squat, tomato-shaped fuyu kind, edible when still a little firm. When I was a child—I feel like I am always writing about this, especially here—my grandfather’s garden also had a persimmon tree. Some years there would be so many fruits on the trees that the slender branches would bow and break, or else we’d cut them ourselves, whole branches brought into the garage or the kitchen, studded with glowing orange persimmons.
For some reason, whenever I see a persimmon still on a tree, I think it must be snowing.
Even if it’s not.
Li-Young Lee, in a poem, describing his blind father’s painting: “Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.”
The persimmon, Diospyros kaki, is, according to Wikipedia, native to China, Northeast India, and Northern Indochina. The term Indochina reminds me of French Indochina, which is what Vietnam was called from 1887 to 1954. My grandparents met during that war, the war in which Vietnam fought back for her freedom from the French. Then, after another war, they came to the United States. A few more things happened, and then I came to be.
Everything comes back to colonialism, or something like it.
My grandfather had a lot of fruit trees. I hope that whoever lives in that house now, white with green shutters, is taking care of them.
But back to the persimmon. I packed the seed in my bag and when I was back home I looked up how to germinate it. I thought, foolishly, that it would be like that second grade science experiment, where you put a bean in a plastic bag with a wet paper towel and taped it to the window. Or maybe like how an avocado pit roots, surprisingly and without much effort, if you follow one of the tutorials on YouTube. Instead, what I learned is that the process takes time—long enough that I felt daunted, holding the shiny brown seed in my hand.
How to germinate a persimmon seed: Clean the seed of any remaining fruit. Place it in a jar of water to soak for two or three days. The seed will not sprout unless it has overwintered—until it has been kept cold and safe over the course of a season. If you live in a place with winters, at the end of fall, plant the seed, still dormant, in a pot tall enough to accommodate the persimmon’s long taproot, and keep it watered. If you don’t, place the seed in a container with something to keep it moist and keep it in the refrigerator for three months. At the start of spring, plant the seed. When it becomes warm—above seventy degrees—the seed will finally start to sprout. Saplings can be planted in the earth after a year or two; a tree will start to bear fruit after three to five years.
Three months, then a year, then five years. Six years from seed to fruit—and that if the seed germinates. When I told Ryan about my plan, he said, six years. And I said, yes. And then I said, I didn’t realize quite how much an act of hope it is to plant a tree, until now.
Many poems have been shared in the past two months. I think often of one by June Jordan, “Calling on All Silent Minorities,” which reads:
HEY
C’MON
COME OUT
WHEREVER YOU ARE
WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE
AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET
And isn’t that the work that resistance and revolution asks of us—to imagine a world that does not yet exist, a world that every rapacious obstacle of modern capitalism is purposefully trying to make unimaginable, a world that must take a wild and freewheeling and devastatingly forward-looking, hopeful imagination to act toward? To meet. At a tree. A tree that hasn’t been planted. Yet.
But if a seed sprouts, and you protect the sapling, and you give it air, and water, and light. Then you get—after years, many years, on a scale larger and longer than individual human lifespans—a tree.
In forests where the foliage from mature trees blocks light from reaching the undergrowth, networks of roots from larger trees will ferry nutrients to saplings in the shade.
We must imagine a world where Palestine is free because that world necessarily contains our liberation, too.
Liberation cannot happen within the status quo; what we take as normal was created to maintain inequity. Liberation must happen so outside of it that it erupts and creates a new world entirely.
When you plant a tree, you are not only planting it for yourself but for the next person, generations later, who might eat its fruit. Who might rest in its shade. I knew this, but until I found the persimmon seed and put it in a glass of water, I did not know this.
There is still the other persimmon my mother sent me. It is ripe now, too; maybe we will eat it after dinner. And maybe it will have a seed. And I’ll clean that one too, and soak it, and overwinter it. More futures, better futures, possible futures.
I knew the persimmon was from the tree when I tasted it; it tasted like the persimmons I ate when I was young. I think often of my grandparents because their lives overlapped with mine so briefly but in theirs I see how much can change in history. And also I loved them.
An occupation can end. In a lifetime, in our lifetime. Let’s make it so.
Till soon,
LP
Thank you for joining me and supporting me in writing this project. Yield Guide will be taking a break through the end of the year. We’ll start up again on January 1st. I have some fun things planned for the new year, including a new series, Conversations, in which I interview friends and other luminaries about what they’ve been observing and paying attention to lately. Have a restful December, and I’ll see you in January!