Pruning

by Lauren Kessler

I started with the pear tree because it was the smallest and ugliest in the orchard. It was also my favorite, a productive, gnarled little thing that, despite all efforts over two decades, listed to the right, like my father when his back went out. To make up for its unsightliness, it produced, every single fall, bumper crops of big, sweet, juicy Anjous. I figured I could prune from the bottom two steps of the ladder. So I started there in late January.

Pruning wasn’t my chore. It had never been my chore. Neither had I been responsible for mowing the front meadow on the tractor. Or checking the propane level in the big tank on the side of the house. Or remembering that Tuesday was garbage day. But now, it was all me. I had watched Tom prune the trees every year for decades. But until I hefted the ladder from spot to spot, until I started lopping off branches above my head, until I climbed up and down scores of times, I didn’t realize how hard it was. I was wearing Tom’s barn jacket, warm, familiar, but too big and as filthy as a working jacket can be that had not been washed in twenty years. I reached into the pocket and found a balled up tissue, his, which according to forensic scientists harbored “copious amounts” of his DNA.

The chores he did. The life we lived. These were my thoughts as I finished the Anjou and moved on to the Hosui Asian pear, its next-orchard neighbor. I liked Asian pears more than he did. I liked a lot of things he didn’t, from Brussel’s sprouts to backcountry hiking, from awakening at dawn to watching International House Hunters. And he liked Afghani food and cribbage and Game of Thrones. Not I. But, when he died four months before pruning time, we had been married for more than three decades and we had (mostly) made it work. 

We had bought land, a shaggy five-acre plot of second- and third-growth Doug fir and white oak with the usual tangle of vine maple and invasive blackberry. We cleared an acre, built a house (rather, designed a house that others built for us), created a huge garden, planted an orchard, deer-fenced it against the marauders that Tom insisted on calling “rats with antlers,” raised chickens, had three children, and created side-by-side careers as writers. We did what it took to make a place go, to make a marriage go. We were better, sometimes, with the former than with the latter. 

When a garden needs weeding, you see it, you know it. You do it. You dig out those offenders by the roots. When the soil is depleted, it tells you, and you work in more compost, manure, bone meal, lime. Fruit trees need pruning every year. You don’t question this. You do it. Or rather, Tom did it. If you don’t whack back the blackberries, they take over, so you whack. And you keep whacking. But a long marriage is different. Or for us it was. 

A long marriage takes itself for granted. A long marriage between two people who don’t do things to hurt each other, who learn to accommodate or keep their own counsel, who settle into what is often enough comfort—that kind of marriage doesn’t tell you what it needs. It just keeps on keeping on. And then you learn too late that what you ignored, or buried and then were were too scared to excavate, what you refused to admit, what you learned to live with because really, everything was okay, wasn’t it—all that surfaces as regret. Or, to be honest, as anger. 

In the months after Tom died, I trudged through a jungle of legal paperwork that kept me from thinking about what had happened. Or, rather, I thought about it—I had to as I navigated probate, assets, taxes, and all the rest—but I did not feel it. And then when I did, I was a hot mess of anger and regret, submerging myself in memories of times that were not good, words that were not said, words that were said and should not have been. It was comforting to rehash the bad times. Maybe not comforting but insulating. Living in that space of anger and regret, I could tell myself that I didn’t have to feel his loss so acutely. 

But with the passage of time, with the grace of a solo 500-mile trek across northern Spain, with the slow softening of my psyche—and with long days of pruning–I have come to a different place. It is simpler. It is less fraught. Out in the orchard, perched on a ladder, dressed in dirty overalls and Tom’s beyond-grubby barn jacket, I finally get to the Fuji. It is the biggest tree in the orchard. Dug into the soil around its roots is a cupful of Tom’s ashes. On the surface, more scattered than arranged, are stones we gathered on many adventures. I used to keep track of where they came from, but after a while I figured it didn’t matter. Wherever we picked them up—along the banks of the Mississippi, along the shores of the Mediterranean—they meant something at that moment. Hanging from the trunk is the blue glass nazar, the amulet we bought in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. It is meant as protection from the evil eye. Wrapped around one of the big branches is a string of beads he brought back from a hiking trip to Peru. 

I maneuver the ladder around the limbs, climb, and start pruning. All those shoots, all those suckers and watersprouts, all that extraneous growth—I lop them off. They are, after all, not what matters. It is the strong trunk that matters. The thick branches, the fruiting spurs. The thing about hard, repetitive work is that it frees your mind. Up there on the ladder, working up a sweat despite the cold wintry afternoon, I see my marriage in that tree. And I lop off what doesn’t matter, what no longer matters, to get to the essence of it, the sturdiness of it, how it endured, how it continued to bear fruit.  And so finally I can come to a place of simply missing him. I can allow myself to miss the best of what we had, the essence of what was us. 

It is high spring now as I write this, and the trees I pruned back in the late winter are blooming. The big apple tree, the Fuji, the one with Tom’s ashes beneath the soil, is last to flower. I go out to mow the lawn inside the deer fence that surrounds the garden and orchard. The grass is almost knee-high. It has been wet and rainy for weeks. But now the air is scoured. The sky is that fragile blue. The blossoms give off a faint sweetness. I am overcome with the feeling—and I mean feeling, as in visceral, a total-body rush and awareness—that he is out there. He said he would be. He told us, right before he took the end-of-life medication sitting on the hospital bed in our living room, surrounded by me and kids, that he was energy, neither created nor destroyed. That he would be with us, that we should use his energy. I do.

And in this moment in the orchard, I am euphoric.

***

photo credit: Lauren Kessler

Lauren Kessler is an award-winning author and (semi) fearless immersion reporter who combines lively narrative with deep research to explore everything from the gritty world of a maximum security prison to the grueling world of professional ballet, from the hidden world of Alzheimer’s sufferers to the stormy seas of the mother-daughter relationship. She is the author of eleven works of narrative nonfiction. Her journalism and essays have appeared in O, Salon, New York Times magazine, Los Angeles Times magazine, and elsewhere. A proud Oregonian, she is a hiker, biker, chicken-wrangler, cat-lover, and aspirational goat herder. With the able assistance of almost none of her three children and the protection of a 10-foot high deer fence, she tends an outsized vegetable plot, a raspberry patch, a blueberry patch, and an apple and pear orchard. For unknown reasons, she loves pulling weeds.