A mystery

I kept my promise to myself today. I grabbed my camera and the sturdy walking stick that my dad made for me about five or six years ago and despite the heat, I went walking.

I did not expect to find much worth photographing, not as long as this furnace heat and deadly dessication persists. But there was still much to see, and I will share it with you all on Monday -- I can't download pictures from that camera onto my home computer.

Far from my home, past the power line cut where poison ivy grows thick and green like the devil's garden, out of the groves of beeches and holly and in the bright light of an old industrial area where young pines now grow, filling the air with their unmistakable sun-warmed fragrance, I found a strange tree.

It has huge, ovate, untoothed, pubescent leaves. I forget to check whether they were opposite or alternate. And it bears a fruit, an odd, green (at least for now)fruit as big (at least for now) as a small plum but more oblong in shape, smooth and rather sticky.

It is a complete mystery to me. It's not a pawpaw or anything in the rose family, like a crabapple. It's not a pod, so couldn't be a catalpa or anything in the acacia family, like a locust bean. It's not a nut, not prickly like a chestnut or a chinqapin. It's not a cluster or a drupe, like mountain ash or sumac.