Remember

Johann Keim found the walnut grove along the Manatawny Creek in 1698 as he walked through the Pennsylvania wilderness day after day, alone in the New World.

Two days before, he had left the last farmhouse with the loan of a blanket and a gift of bread. He traveled on, following the creek so he had a sure route back.

Half a year before, he closed his carpentry shop back in the Rhineland, a pitiful small business after years of invasion and war. On that winter night, he left the empty shop behind him, walked slowly up the river and along the quiet street.

He was twenty-three years old and had nothing to show for his years of apprenticeship. Johann sat down under the bare arms of a walnut tree at the edge of the street and looked up at the clouds above him. From far away, something called to him. He closed his eyes, stood, and stretched, testing the pull.

All around him, empty lots and houses testified to the trouble of the last several years. He looked down at his worn boots and callused hands and then back up into the branches above him and the chill blue beyond. He nodded at the tree as if he answered it.

He took the shortest route home.

For two years now, he and his father had lived alone, two years of endless chilly evenings and loaves of dark, dry bread.

“Father,” said Johann. “I closed the shop. Permanently, that is. I feel that it’s time I check out my prospects—I’m thinking of making a tour through Pennsylvania.”

“The New World.” His father sat in the darkness. Two years alone, with ever decreasing work and bread, had stolen his words, and he offered neither support nor resistance, but folded his hands, his chin on his chest. The shadows from the fire stretched across his face.

“The New World,” Johann repeated. “It’s surely better than this.” He took out the chest and counted his savings, piece by piece.

Six months later he stood alone in the woods along the creek. He walked through a clearing and up to a spring surrounded by walnut trees. The water bubbled up, clear and cool. He knelt to drink, and his hand touched a baby walnut tree.

This.

He sank to the ground and closed his eyes, breathing deep of the earthy spice, a scent he recognized.

This.

He dug his hands in the dampness of decaying leaves and drank from the spring.

This.

He had not seen a cabin for two days, or a trail for many hours. He sat and felt the deepest strings of his heart reaching down, down, down. The leaves whispered and chattered above him. He dug his hands into the soil under the rich old leaves.

He must have slept.

When he opened his eyes, he watched a squirrel run up and down the tallest tree. It darted behind a branch and peeked back out, with a look of laughter. In that moment, a yellow butterfly floated down and settled on a fern near the spring.

The light dimmed, but Johann had never seen more clearly.

He heard something that only the trees can tell.

Carefully he spread his blanket over the ferns and folded his coat under his head. Then he opened his pack and took out the last of the bread bought from the farmer’s wife. There, half a world away from his own empty shop with the low, locked door, he slept like a man come home.

The next morning, Johann left the place on reverent feet. Not for a moment did he question his future. He would return. Back he went to Germantown, where he spent a year working and saving and planning, then back again to the Rhineland, three months at sea.

He walked up the dusty street, entered the quiet house and greeted the old man with a bag of wages.

“You are home, my son?”

“I am home.”

He sat at the table with the old man and told him all about sailing, life in Germantown, and the farmer’s houses in the land beyond the sea.

Then he told him of the walnut trees and the spring.

“You know what walnuts mean,” the old man said. “Walnuts grow in the richest soil. Where walnuts grow, men can raise anything.”

Days went by, months, one year, then two. The old man grew frail. Johann worked for carpenter friends and added to his savings. Day by day, he nodded to Bertha, a girl with the bluest eyes he had ever seen.

It took months before Bertha nodded back, and a year before she returned his greeting, but the following spring, six months after the old man’s death, they married. Six months after that, the two stepped off the ship at Germantown. A year later, with their savings renewed and their supplies on their backs, they made their way along the creek, back to the spring under the walnut trees.

Their first child was born that year, an American daughter. Across the creek from the walnut grove, they opened a spot in the woods for a house and a field. Day after day, Johann crossed the creek and walked through the walnut trees, and Bertha knelt at the spring for clear, cold water.

The soil was rich, as the old man said. They raised grain and cut hay.

The ancient trees stood tall, tended by one Keim after another.

Johann gathered walnuts. He picked up branches and cut out dead trees and branches. From these he built, just as he had in the old country, chairs, beds, and spinning wheels.

He went back to the field where he planted the seed and hoed out the weeds.

The years rolled by, and then decades, until they numbered a century and more.

Johann’s children still tended the fields and the walnut trees. They were farmers, but every generation worked with wood, their hands steady, their work true. They bought another farm just down the creek where they built a stone house and added a springhouse and barn. They developed their own apple tree.

The children grew and the family branched out, far and away. One by one, they slept near Johann in the graveyard near the walnut trees.

One April day, Conrad Keim left Pennsylvania for the Ohio frontier. Beside Conrad walked his wife, who carried their six-month-old daughter. Four hundred miles ahead of them lay their future.

Behind them, the spring bubbled and sang under the walnut trees next to the graves where so many of the family slept. In the stone house, another old Keim and his sisters sat by the stove and dreamed.

Ahead of Conrad lay a long road, that ended in a farm at Cherry Corners. Shoulder to shoulder, Conrad and his wife traveled the road and built the farm. Together they discovered the wealth in the soil, and there they built a home.

They built their house beside a creek under a walnut tree.

The daughter grew up and married a man and raised fifteen strong children. They left the fields in Ohio and traveled by wagon to the Kansas frontier.

In Kansas, the man and his wife built a house with a porch, and all around the house, they planted trees: peach trees and apple trees, osage orange and mulberry. Down by the creek, their son planted a branch he had carried all the way from Ohio.

These days, no one remembers that the wife was once a Keim.

The Kansas house burned down long ago.

The children and their children branched out and away.

In Pennsylvania, the old folks died, and someone sold the walnut grove.

But deep in the woods, there grows a walnut tree.

On a Midwest orchard, you find Keim apple trees.

By the Kansas creek an old tree stands alone.

I sit on the earth at its foot, my hands in the leaves, smelling the wealth of the soil. She was here, that grandmother, so many years before me. Like her, I walk through the fields and under the leaves.

This.

And the apples bloom and the fields spread wide, and though the spring is long forgotten, somewhere a walnut sprouts and grows.

And an apple seed drops and a child is born.

We forget so much.

But the earth remembers, in the wealth of the soil and the blue of the sky: it lives, it pulls, it grows. Listen to the whisper there under the tree.

The water. The light. These leaves.

Tend it, this green.