Some years our oak makes acorns, and some years it doesn’t. When I mowed the other day, I saw a round green nut with a little brown cap on the ground, and I knew this was an acorn year.

Last week, I took a few minutes to explore under our oak tree. I wanted to find an acorn, and I did. I had planned to take it up to the deck with my journal, but instead I sat down in the grass in the dappled sunlight. In our eight years of living here, I’d never sat in the grass there on that little hill under the oak, never seen our house or the tree or the neighborhood from that perspective.

The breeze was cool, and the sun warm in the places it reached me through the leaves. On my drive home from the pool that day, I saw maples tinged with red and pink. Just a touch. Like acorns on the ground, pink-tinged maples portend the coming cool crispness of fall.

After I’d sat for a few minutes in the quiet, I heard the flutter of wings above me as a bird lighted on the bird feeder. As soon as I turned my head to see it, I heard a flutter again as the bird darted back into the tree. I looked up, and a little black-capped chickadee perched alert on a swaying limb above me, just a few feet away.

The ground around me was littered with empty acorn cups. This must be what the squirrels are so busy with. I picked up an acorn they hadn’t gotten to yet, a plump green one. In my hand, I held the potential for an oak. This little green nut, smaller than the pad of my thumb and nestled in its cute brown cup, could grow a tree twice as tall as our house.

These trees make hundreds, maybe thousands of acorns in the hope that at least a few will be buried and take root. Then, on water and sunlight and nutrients in the soil, they’ll grow. They’ll make leaves that turn light into food. That never fails to blow my mind. Sunlight! Into food! It’s magical to me. They’ll take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and release clean oxygen for us to breathe. The oaks that these acorns will become, buried by squirrels and forgotten until they sprout, these oaks will clean the air, and provide us shade, and make leaves that rustle prettily in the breeze. They’ll make shelter for birds and food for squirrels. They’ll stabilize the earth if we give them space to.

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