An ode to the pussy willow.

I have been very busy this weekend cutting down an apple tree that has borne wormy apples for it’s entire existence in our yard. We finally gave up trying to keep the worms out.

We also began pruning several peach trees that are overloaded with peaches. When I was finished, I was ready to cut back this plant that Susie put at the corner of our barn abut five years ago.

“Don’t touch that tree.” She said.

“Tree??? I didn’t know it was a tree.”

“Well, it’s sort of a tree. It’s a Pussy Willow.”

“A Pussy Willow???” I said “That’s a pussy Willow??” I was mistakenly under the impression that the Pussy Willow grew along creek banks and I said so. 

“That’s a cattail, dummy.”

“Cattails. Pussy Willows. What’s the difference?”

“A lot. Leave it alone. It provides a lot of shade.”

The way  that she said it provided shade was reminiscent of a poem that Longfellow or Keats or somebody wrote about a shade tree. It was buried deep in the recesses of my mind, possibly placed there by a freshman English Literature class more than fifty years ago. Unfortunately, that’s all that I could retrieve from the aforementioned dark recesses. Longfellow or Keats.

Anyway, the thought struck me that perhaps I should write a poem about this plant and its shade providing characteristics but poetry is not really my long suit.

Anybody have any idea about what might rhyme with pussy willow??