OHIO BUCKEYE (Aesculus glabra). Observed twice weekly since 2023 for the Ohio Seasons Project. Please do not disturb the marker. This tree keeps honest time.
Tamsin's paper came out in January, in a journal I had to have her explain to me, about early leaf-out in native trees across central Ohio. My buckeye is Figure 3. I am in the acknowledgments, between a man in Chillicothe with sixty-two lilacs and a fourth-grade class in Zanesville.
At the bus stop at Larkspur and Thrasher, in late March, the young mother in leggings — her name is Kendra Moss, and she works nights at a distribution center and was, it turned out, one of the people in Karen's folders — waited for me on the corner one Friday morning and said she was sorry, and that her daughter, Ava, who is eight, had been asking about the tree lady. Ava has her own point now. WH-8. A little flowering dogwood in the Mosses' front yard, which Kendra planted the week they moved in because it was the state flower of North Carolina, where she grew up, and she missed it. Ava photographs it every Tuesday before the bus with a waterproof camera that Gus bought her at a pawnshop on Route 23 and pretended he'd found in his basement.
And on the morning of March 24, a Tuesday, at 7:04 a.m., bearing 215 degrees, the Ohio buckeye on the common triangle at the bend of Larkspur Lane broke bud.
I saw it through the viewfinder before I saw it with my eyes: the big varnished winter buds, sticky as flypaper, split at their tips, and out of each one a little crumpled fist of green. Two days earlier than last year. Nine days earlier than the average from the 1990s, according to Figure 3.
Gus was beside me with two coffees in a cardboard carrier. Ruth was coming up the sidewalk in her sun hat, though it was barely fifty degrees. Across the street, Priya was walking Biscuit, and the boys were running ahead in their headlamps, which they wear now on principle.
"Well?" Gus said.
"Breaking bud," I said, and took the picture, and then the backup, and checked the time stamp, which was correct. I wrote it in the ledger in pencil, and I thought about Dale, and his thin, sour syrup that we put on everything, and what he used to say about this tree.
It tells you what it's going to do. Then it does it. You can set a calendar by it.
You can, it turns out, set a great deal by it.
"Come on," I said to Gus, and took my coffee. "Six more."