The Farmer Who Planted Shade

There was a farmer, seventy-eight years old, who spent one full week in early spring planting a row of young oaks along the eastern edge of his top field. His neighbour, riding past on the tractor, stopped to watch him. When the farmer came up for water, the neighbour, who was a practical man and did not intend to be unkind, said, 'You know those won't give shade in your lifetime.'

The farmer wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He said, 'I know.'

'Then why?'

'Because,' said the farmer, and this is the sentence the neighbour thought about for the rest of his life, 'my grandfather planted the walnuts I sat under as a boy, and it never occurred to me until now to wonder who he was doing it for.'

The neighbour rode home slowly. He was fifty-two. He had spent a good portion of his adult life, if he was honest, thinking in seasons and in years — this year's harvest, next year's price, the ten-year plan for the barn. He had not, in twenty-eight years of farming, thought once in the unit the old man was thinking in, which was generations. It made him, sitting on the tractor in the low evening light, feel small in a way that was not diminishing. It was the smallness one feels in a cathedral. It suggested that a bigger space existed than the one in which he had been living.

There is a story that circulates in different forms in many old cultures. In one version, a young Roman asks an old man why he is planting an olive tree that will not fruit for forty years. In another, a Talmudic sage stops beside a man planting a carob and asks the same question. The answer is always the same. I found a world already planted for me. I plant so that I in turn may leave a planted world.

It is a strange thing, this instinct. It runs directly against every reward system we have built around ourselves. We are trained, most of us, to plant what we can harvest. We measure quarters, we celebrate anniversaries, we time our efforts to our own visible payoff. The tree that will shade the grandchild is a poor performer on any dashboard. It cannot be praised. It cannot be paid for. It cannot even, quite, be photographed to show the return on investment.

And yet the world we live in is, almost entirely, the work of people who planted trees they would not sit under. The book that changed your life was written by someone who did not know you would read it. The road you drove to work on was laid by someone who never met you. The medicine that saved your child was invented by a person who died before your child was born. The vote you cast today was made possible by people who spent decades of their lives, and sometimes their whole lives, on a right that was extended long after they were in the ground.

The question is not whether other people have planted for you. They have. The question is whether you will plant for anyone else. It does not have to be an oak. It can be small. Teach one skill you were taught. Write down the recipe your grandmother made. Mentor a person younger than you and expect nothing in return. Give money to a cause whose full result you will not live to see. Plant, in whatever medium is yours, something that will not fruit in your season.

The old farmer finished his row that week. He lived, as it happened, three more years — long enough to see the oaks reach his shoulder but not near long enough to sit under them. He did not seem to mind. When his neighbour came to the funeral, he stopped by the top field on the way home and looked at the young trees, which were, by then, almost as tall as he was. He went home, and the next morning, without saying anything to anyone, he began digging holes along the western edge of his own top field. He was fifty-five. He was, at last, planting shade.