What The Trees Remember

In venturing outside to care for our many animals, my father made a discovery ripe with complex emotion. For context, our outdoor territory gradually became a beautiful orchard over the years, thanks to my mother and his late wife, Carmen. But this summer day, his eyes settled on a plum tree that had never yet bore fruit, one she had planted roughly 3 years ago. It was suddenly “plum full”, with countless tiny fruits coming into being, fresh with possibility and becoming just beneath the skin. So many of them, in fact, I would struggle to estimate the quantity in a guess.

We stood in awe, both admiring the tree and painfully wishing she could be there to witness it with us. We know how it would have fulfilled her, and we longed to share that with her.

Neither of us possess the culinary skill Carmen had. She could take 12 different ingredients, half of which you’d never heard of before, and make something incredible. Every meal, pie, blueberry tart or mason jar full of delicious apple butter was an “I love you” she delivered with a soft, telling smile on her face, rightfully proud of her creation but I think more-so satisfied with the act of giving itself.

After lingering for a while in the disorienting fog between beauty and loss, the “Boy” (that is what Carmen called my Father in her column, “The Briar Philosopher”) came to a proper conclusion. We could let the plums go through their natural cycle, leave them, admire them, harvest and eat them as is- But there would still be a nagging sense that something was incomplete. So instead, he decided he would give them away to someone with the ability to make something amazing with them, the way she would have.

Ultimately, sharing was typically the true goal anyway, whether it was with my father, me, or countless others who experienced her generosity. We also acknowledged that she’d have almost certainly written about this tree in her Briar Philosopher column. So today, I will write for her.

They leave us more than silence,
more than rooms that hold their shape,
more than sweaters folded carefully,
or recipes we can’t remake

They leave us seeds beneath the soil,
small promises we couldn’t see,
until one ordinary evening
standing beneath a tree

A tree she planted years ago
stands heavy now with proof:
that love can work in hidden roots
and still rise, green, out towards the truth

For those we love do not stop giving
when breath has left and days move on;

their kindness ripens after them,
their labors sweetened in the dawn

And somewhere in the giving,
in jams and pies delight,
the tree bears fruit, and so does grief,
if you let it see the light

“I Am the Love that I Live” – Carmen Leah Abner