Yesterday afternoon, I was visiting with Kim Hinson at his shop, German Imports, in Kannapolis.
We had been talking for a good while, about a wide variety of topics: business, money, illness, health, stress, life, death, family, the past, the present, and the future.
Kim’s full of ideas and insights — always entertaining and always enlightening.
As I was leaving, about 6:15, he said, “Have you seen my tree?”
“What tree?” I asked. “That one?”
I pointed to a big tree in his front yard.
Kim’s shop is just down a hill from his house.
“No,” he said. “Hold on. You wanna see this.”
Well…we were surrounded by trees anyway. I was actually ready to go home and eat dinner, and I didn’t know where this tree was and why I would want to see it. I knew it was in the opposite direction from where I had parked my car.
But if somebody can be that excited about a tree, well, I guess I had to see the tree.
He locked up his shop and we walked up the hill and around to the back of his house.
And there was the tree.
“Oh. That tree. Who did that?”
He gave me the artist’s name but I didn’t catch it.
And after all the talking we had done earlier, he didn’t have much to say about it. It’s a two hundred year old oak that died, and now it looks like this.
And now I’m curious. Does it have a name? Whose idea was that (Kim’s, I’m sure). What is it?
But the answers to those questions are for another day.
“See you later,” he said. He had company — some folks standing in his back yard, waiting to see him. So he turned and walked past the tree in his backyard to see them.