The Great Pine Cone

The eight-year-old boys were supposed to be playing their version of two-man baseball while their sisters had soccer practice, but when I looked over at the backstop, they were not there. I walked across the muddy, squishy grass and then the dirt of the baseball diamond and heard them before I saw them. They were behind the fence, in the skinny dugout, sitting on either side of an enormous pine cone, which they had propped up on the faded green wooden bench.

Being a writer and an English instructor, I chose my words carefully: “What the heck?”

“We found it.”

“It’s ours.”

It was one of those pine cones you find on the ground but can’t really imagine ever hanging from a tree. Huge. Beautiful. Designed by future architects, possibly on a more advanced planet.

The boys intended to bring it home, they told me. They had worked out a custody schedule. I pictured it on our dining room table, the table bending in in the center, legs buckling. I pictured in on the sports chest in the front porch, me lifting it out of the way to get out the baseball gloves, putting it back, heading to the kitchen sink to try to scrub off a pine sap that wouldn’t scrub off.

I shook that off and reminded myself they were honoring something wonderful, nature-made, a found miracle really.

“Great,” I said, meaning it. “It’s beautiful.”

“Yeah,” they admitted dreamily.

—

The next morning, my son, the first custodian of the pine cone, made grunting noises as he loaded it into his backpack. I did not supervise this effort. I thought it was nice that already on day two, the other custodian would be reunited with his treasure.

I forgot about the great pine cone until after school. Whereas many children run to the arms of their parents, my son avoids eye contact as he sprints out to the play yard in search of friends. I represent, “Let’s go home.” Lately, he has been sitting and huddling with his fellow third grader friends, often in the sunniest, hottest part of the asphalt yard (perhaps because I lurk in the cool shade), to trade Pokemon cards (an unexpected resurgence has occurred but that is another story). Today, however, the group of six or seven kids stood near the basketball courts, hoisting the great pine cone. It was passed around as they talked excitedly. They moved as one organism off towards the painted lines of the kickball area.

Meanwhile, I stood talking with fellow teacher/parents. We talked about sweet students. We talked about self-destructive ones. We talked about zombies. Then, from all the way across the yard, I saw a boy I didn’t know, blond and empowered, lift the pine cone and hurl it against the wall. Then a feisty girl with dark hair did the same.

I moved swiftly across the yard, taking long strides. I felt strangely protective of this object. It had quickly become like a grandchild to me. When I reached the group, I noticed they were all happy, even the parents of the cone. “Why are you smashing it?” I asked.

“We are harvesting seeds,” said one boy with a grin.

I looked and they were scooping up seeds from all around home plate on the kickball area. My son had two handfuls of seeds.

“Are you going to share them?” I asked him.

“No,” said the group. “We’re giving them to him to keep.” They had already worked this out as a tribe. The other custodian would take home the pine cone, surprisingly still intact, and my son was to be the keeper of the seeds.

—

When we got home, my son went straight to the backyard. When he marched into the kitchen, he told me, proudly. “I planted the seeds near the tomato plants. And I watered them.” He thought about it for a moment, then added. “I sure hope they are fast-growing.”

I am not sure I entirely understand what the parable of the great pine cone will mean in tribal memory. I do know that two boys were throwing a tennis ball back and forth and catching it with baseball gloves when the nearby trees called to them. Maybe it was an errant throw that drew them to the forest aside a middle school field. In the woods they found a glorious pine cone and one or both knew it to be a treasure.

Even in a city of nearly half a million people, a concrete place of freeways and cars and too many streets and not enough fields, there are still trees among us, around us, and they do more than clean our air, feed living creatures and paint green the landscape. They can even stop a couple of sports maniacs in the middle of a high-speed game of catch and get them to drop their gloves in the dirt. They can form tribes of gardeners on the asphalt, who leave bundles of Pokemon cards tucked away in backpacks as they chatter excitedly and harvest seeds for the future.

I find it comforting to know there is a magic forest of pine trees growing just out back, planted by a little boy and his friends, just past the tomato vines.