This morning, I was cleaning out my desk and found the following journal entry I paused to write while walking in Central Park. The entry didn’t make it into WE SHARE THE SAME SKY, a memoir.

***

   At last, I have found a place that bears a resemblance to home -Central Park!

   I cannot live without trees, trees and leaves, leaves, oh, beautiful leaves.

   A sudden peace fills me, and reaching up, I pluck one from a nearby low limb.

   My intentions are to press it and put it away in a book so that one day when it is pulled down from its shelf, the page will fall open to this reminder, a token of a worthwhile week in the city.

   The words to my favorite Walt Whitman poem dance across my mind.

   “…All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches; without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green…”

   The light here in the park is different than that within the rest of the city. Nature reflects it differently. Or perhaps it is that it is absorbed more, rather than reflected.

   And, the sounds are more familiar to my heart. I can hear the laughter of children at play on the lawn, birds in the distance calling to one another from beneath the overhang of tree limbs, like the children -dancing, chirping.

   And suddenly, as though from nowhere in particular, I am hungry for home.

***

   10 p.m. and I am back at the room, trying to find the name of the tree. Bark- dark grayish brown & rough, large dark green leaves. I flip through the pages of my field guide; back and forth I go. I find it and laugh loudly!

It is the Kentucky Coffeetree!

   There is no getting away from the South!!

     Elizabeth Mozley Partridge

📚WE SHARE THE SAME SKY is available on Amazon: ✔️https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00J7KJWIU