July 12, 2004
Deodar Redux
Some of our long-time readers will remember that we’ve a deodar cedar in our yard. It grows outside a bank of front windows that make one wall of the kitchen library, perhaps the choicest spot of all its fellow adornments. This way, it can be admired all around.
When last I wrote of it, it’d not yet given up its Christmas lights and seemed rather to be smirking that Douglas, the mobile fir serving as the inside Christmas “tree,” not only had given up its, but was also on its way to the shredder ultimately to line the city park pathways.
A native of India, deodar is also known as the “timber of the gods.” None other of our landscapers can claim such a birthright, nor have they the comparable noblesse oblige that accompanies it.
Seemingly to fulfill that obligation (note the anthropomorphic segué), deodar began in late spring — and continues — to put forth resplendent new growth in the customary lighter shade of green of most plants. Deodar’s already uniquely elegant feathery appearance thus becomes even more startling. Almost as if to replace the lights that came off on Christmas Twelve, it makes its own, if somewhat overdue, epiphany.
We churchers perhaps thought we were done with all that show-it-to-the-Gentiles stuff come Lent and certainly by now could settle in for a long Pentecostal nap. On the other hand, perhaps deodar might, for a moment, turn us way from our current obsessions to get moving with some of God’s gifts to us ourselves and stop letting the grace grow under our feet.