The Cashew tree in our garden next to our cottage, offers a fascinating sight! It has different generations of fruits. The season started in December and the tree continues to have flowers even now with tender cashew nuts. This is unlike the earlier years, when the flowering started in February and the fruiting season was over by April.
It is customary to attribute many changes we see in nature in the recent years to climate change!
Ever since the the United States of America, which was one of the sponsors of the Paris Treaty on Climate, withdrew from that treaty since the new president took over recently, there is an alarm signal in the minds of environmental scientists about further climate distress!
Apart from the sadness caused by the position of the United States of America on climate, what brought to my attention yesterday was a new consciousness about the gifts a tree brings! Its foliage, flowers, fruits, and the shelter it is to birds and squirrels are just a few of the gifts that the tree brings to the garden.
A sapling of less than one foot height, that we planted seven years ago, is now a large tree, which needs pruning every year due to the spreading of its branches in all directions.
A tree grows and offers its gifts to nature!
A family too is such a gift to society!
Every family brings its goodness to add to the pool of gifts for others.
When Anna and I got the attic of our cottage cleaned yesterday, I came across some vessels which my mother used for various purposes. One was a vessel, which was used to measure milk to give to those in the neighbourhood. All women in the neighbourhood who were expecting a baby received milk from our home. That was her gift to them with no payment taken. Although it might be one or two every year, she continued the practice till she was well enough to keep cows at home. I come across people in our village, who benefitted from this practice !
One gift which my father offered was saplings of coconut to the neighbourhood. He had a nursery of coconut saplings about twenty five every year, which he distributed, up to five to each person. That was how he popularised coconut palms in our village.
I travelled back in my memory lane to my childhood yesterday, when I was around six years, when it was my activity during the summer months to gather cashew nuts from the trees. The neighbours received the share of the fruits !
The neighbourhood was the orbit in which people lived. In fact, there were no boundary walls at that time.
The neighbourhood consciousness is vanishing ! The insular living has become the norm.
The neighbours were gifts to each other!
I ponder over this shift!
The cashew tree in our garden remains as a symbol of gift that it is !
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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