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Friday Slide Show: Ancient Olive Trees
18 March 2022
We last featured a slide show of Mountain Lake Park in 2015, explaining why "its sun has always seemed a bit warmer to us."
Since we moved away from the Richmond district in 2003, we've rarely gotten the chance to visit our old haunt. But this week we had an hour to kill between appointments in the old neighborhood, the rain had stopped and we thought, "Why not take a stroll through the park?"
So that's exactly what we did.
Compared to our 2015 images, the place has suffered from serious neglect during the pandemic. You can barely get to the shoreline of the little lake, which is the only natural lake in the 80,000-acre Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
But one attraction remains, if a bit the worse for wear. It's the olive trees that line the southern side of the path that circles the park.
Olive trees require a Mediterranean climate of hot summers and cool winters. To us, they represent a link between the ancient world our ancestors came from and the new world they rooted the family in. A little of the old world alive in the new.
And certainly these particularly olive trees in Mountain Lake Park are no strangers to us, having been wheeled by them in our baby carriage every day only a few years (well, decades) ago.
So it was nice to visit them again. In fact, we found it moving. There is something indomitable about them that reminds us we are stronger than we think.
