Our strawberries finally came in. We picked nine last night, and my eldest daughter sat on the kitchen floor afterward, hand to mouth in near frenzy, fruit tinting her fingers red. Last year the sun scorched the leaves in the first weeks after planting; eventually we built a tiny tent to shield them. We saved the plants but saw no fruit. 

Consider for a moment the uncanny design, the mechanism and meaning, the implications and metaphors inherent in fruit.

It’s possible for seeds to disperse without it. There are many other means of seed dissemination: the hundred parachutes flying from dandelion, the seed pods floating gently downstream. Think of how effortlessly the cottonwood tree fills the air with its puffed masses of seed, seed, seed.

These rely, for better or for worse, on blind chance. Wind and water are temperamental carriers. They arrive at will and do as they please.

Fruit, however, is distinctly made to appeal. We animals are predictable in our taste for all things sweet. The animal eats, then chucks or spits or defecates the seeds on the side of the road. Sorry to be graphic, but there you have it.

Animals and fruiting plants climb hand-over-fist into mutual prosperity. The fruit feeds the animal; the animal scatters the seed; both win higher odds at reproduction. Is it any wonder that God crammed Eden full of fruit?

There are plants that cannot reproduce without fruit. A strawberry plant, however, has a choice.

The strawberry, if it’s too hot or too wet, starving or overfed on nutrients, sucked by pests or drained by pathogens, lacking bees or butterflies or some other agent to aid pollination...that’s it, folks: No fruit, no seeds.

Forget fruit, says the strawberry under pressure. Fruit is an extravagance. Fruit requires enormous effort and energy and diverted resources. And if nothing picks it up, it’ll simply fall right near the parent root; a bit of a waste, considering.

Under pressure, a strawberry will breed without seed. Under pressure, it will simply and quietly shoot out a runner, find an anchor point, and belly crawl forward. 

So why fruit? 

The whole appeal of fruit is its far reach. A strawberry's runner may only go so far, but a fruit could travel, in the pocket of a carrier, miles in the course of a single sunny day.

So when the strawberry is healthy, it fruits.

A strawberry, therefore, is not made to crawl through the dust but to reach new territory. 

But I asked you some time ago to consider the metaphor. The fruit wrought of your own hands.

For me, writing is: Seed, seed, seed, and hope that something takes. It seems an impossible business. Each piece I write requires enormous time, effort, energy diverted from other tasks. If no one picks it up, it’ll drop at my own feet: a waste. (On the coffee table at this very moment: another form rejection. How long shall I continue this way?)

A strawberry plant may belly crawl forward in the dust, searching for anchor points, familiar ground to cling to, and sometimes I wish I could skip fruit altogether. Fruit is exhausting. Wouldn’t it be easier? To content myself with a simpler life, to quit this calling, to stop sending missives into a world that won’t miss me, that is everlastingly absorbed in its own handiwork? 

But I am not made to crawl through the dust. And I can’t stop considering it: the landscape outside of my own patch of earth, where my own hard-wrought fruit may land and find soft soil.

The Apple Tree

I’m shocked to see the apple tree, in spite of everything, put out some blooms this year. I had figured it for dead.

We bought the tree with the house, and got somewhere around six apples the fall after we moved in. Last year, we got none.

The tree, which struggles for room against the fence in the back corner of our lot, had been sadly neglected. You let an apple tree run wild, and it will send all its branches into the air at once. They will compete amongst themselves for available space, and grow every-which-way: downturned, crossed over, tucked under, in U-bends.

All those branches put out their leaves, which exist to absorb sunlight and transform it into energy, and this energy is needed for the purpose of producing fruit. Without a good pruning, the branches crowd one another out, cross over and cast shadows, and the light can’t get in. Less light, less fruit, it's as simple as that.

The apple tree does what is apparently intuitive: Grow more branches, send out more leaves, hope to absorb more sun. More leaves, right? That must be the solution: Just. Do. More. The branches go in too many directions. The light can’t reach in. The tree chokes on its own efforts.

Our apple tree, apparently, has no sense for priorities. So it divided its energy equally into several of its biggest branches. Our tree wrapped one of those branches in a chokehold around the other. It looked like a pair of serpents locked in struggle at the crest.

Those two branches rubbed a layer of protective bark from one another, and left our tree bare, exposed. What is to protect it from disease, now, or invasion by insects, or even the cold?

A good gardener will hack off pieces of an apple tree’s body every year. Lop them right off in the fall, no matter whether they managed fruit or not. “Some fruit” is not the deciding factor of whether a branch stays. A branch earns its keep by the direction it grows; that’s it. The aim of the gardener is to let light in. A branch that blocks light has got to go. More light, more fruit; it’s simple as that.

Lately, I’ve been hungry for light. What kind of instincts are mine? Generally, to send up more branches, make more leaves. The more that go into the air, the more are likely to turn down, cross over, U-turn. 

And I feel I cannot reasonably take the blade to any of them.

A year ago I trimmed our apple tree with a pair of shears as long as my arm. I snipped off downturned branches and those that criss-crossed, their aims clearly in direct competition, unable to co-exist. But I was afraid to cut any of the larger branches, so I snipped mostly twigs. I could see clearly how twisted and misshapen the larger branches had grown, how truly unhealthy they had become. Still, I held back my hand.

I didn’t want to kill it. And that was the real fear, when we were talking cutting off one of the two serpent heads at the top of the trunk, one of the two locked into a struggle for dominance.

The tree cannot grow correctly with two competing for the crown. One steals from the other, and neither can truly thrive.

But I was afraid that killing one and choosing the other for survival would doom the whole thing. I could not shake the image of lopping off one of the tree's arms; surely it would just bleed out. We’re talking significant damage, a significant portion of its life. It had put years into that branch. And here I wanted to cut it in the course of minutes.

How can a thing live with that kind of loss? Isn’t it better to let it continue on in its disfigurement? Unhealthy is better than dead, right?

My husband didn’t think so. Last fall, he hacked off that big branch. He chopped it off and tossed it in a pile, along with a bunch of other branches. He cut them off and threw them into the fire later that winter. I came home and noticed, not so much the tree itself but the air around it, the space, the way it looked as though it could finally breathe. It was after I saw the space that I realized that almost half the tree was gone.

“Do you really think it can survive all that at once?” I asked him.

He didn’t know. But he figured, if it kept going the way it was, it was going to wind up fruitless anyway. What was the point?

And last week, I saw them, the tiny miracles: pink and white blossoms sprinkled on the branches, just in time for spring.

Where my feet have walked

They're still searching for the dead in Oso. A month ago, the rain poured down, the river rose, the earth swelled, the hillside collapsed, and the tidal wave of mud came thundering down. They counted 41 dead, but a month later, they're still searching for more.

On the radio this morning, a geologist said he never imagined that a landslide could do what it did there, wiping out the highway across the river, burying homes, killing people. He had walked up and down that slope before, with the mind of a man who thinks about the way the earth groans and shifts, the processes that bring things down, raise others up. His feet touched the ground that was cursed, doomed.  He thought of the motions of rock and rain.

And he did not see it. Did not see it coming.

What patches of earth have your feet walked upon? How do you know the fate of the place you call your home?

You cannot know.

I like to ease my own anxiety with the thoughts that things like this could never happen to me, not in my neighborhood, far from fault lines and oceans that rise and mountains that fall. Still, nature will manage to find a way for death, when it wishes. Last year we watched the rain fall and friends' homes flood. Before that, there were the fires, blindly consuming. Last week I heard tell of a woman whose mother died because of chemicals leached into her drinking water for years. So her home that seemed so safe actually killed her.

This is what harrows me about disaster, that it is so blind, and immunities don't hold.

I have walked the mountain road that flash flooded last year, where the teenager drowned in her car, where the old man drowned in his basement.

When I was young, I walked the halls of the high school where two boys would later stage a massacre, and kill a dozen children.

Five years ago, I walked the streets of Damascus, before those same streets where I shopped and snapped photographs became a war zone. Bombs hit and bullets flew where my feet had tread.

My feet touched these sacred grounds, these hallowed places. Why should I have been there at a fortunate time, instead of a month, a year, a day later?

We do not smell death coming. Not even those of us trained to look for it, trained to read the rock and rain.

Worms and regeneration

On Sunday we turned the garden soil, marveling as worms the diameter of my index finger squirmed and bunched in every clump we heaved up and over. Every time I sliced my shovel into the ground, I wondered how many worms I had accidentally decapitated. I hated to do so; they are good for the garden. When we bought this house you couldn't pay a worm to take up residence in the bare patch of ground on the sunniest side of the yard. It was dry as elephant skin. Not even weeds would grow there.

Now, just one growing season (and many, many composted banana peels) later, the dirt is the color of espresso and I kept stopping work to bend and gawk at the life writhing just under the surface. The worm real estate market has turned a corner, and bidding's gettin' fierce. Every worm on earth wants to live in our garden.

It's amazing how quickly you can go from parched desert to garden of Eden.

Do worms keep living after you cut them in half? my husband and I wonder. Because there they go, the poor injured ones, bunching and stretching, scrunching their severed bodies back into the ground. Nah, of course not, is the obvious conclusion. But the question still niggles at my mind, because stranger things have happened. Nature can be surprising, and ridiculous, and unbelievable.

I looked it up later: The head side of a worm can, indeed, survive the loss of half its body. Like salamanders and starfish, a worm possesses the power of regeneration. Cut off its tail and a new one will sprout. 

What is the process like, for a worm? After it loses half of itself, does it begin regeneration passively? The way, when your pregnant, cells keep dividing, things keep growing, whether you are thinking about it or not? Even when you're asleep? Or is regeneration something that takes intense energy and effort; like childbirth, is regeneration something that requires everything you've got?

In some circles, regeneration doesn't imply missing limbs but intense rehabilitation. Like an extreme makeover for your soul. They speak of something broken that needs fixing. A few stitches and a great big band-aid, give it a few weeks, and you’ll be good as new.

But regeneration actually speaks of something missing. Something amputated, gone. There's not a band-aid in the world, folks. We don’t like to talk like this, like we are fundamentally lacking wholeness. We don’t want to admit it. Denial is an attractive force when the alternative is facing a reality as bleak as this: Pieces of us have been severed, sliced to pieces. They are gone.

The mind is a tricky devil. It will lie to you. 

Human amputees speak of a phenomenon called “phantom pains.” It’s the sensation of pain, or itching, or cold, in a limb that is missing. Your rational mind knows your arm has been cut off, but your actual experience, your feelings, demonstrate staunch denial. The mind creates pain in the absence of what has been lost.

It has me thinking about the pain points of my life. 

It has me thinking about what pieces of me are beyond recovery, permanently cut off.

The phantom pains keep cropping up, in my relationships, in my parenting, when I sit down to write. Here, too, I lack wholeness. Part of me knows it. 

The other part just keeps shooting pain in the absence. I yelled at my daughter again. I cannot stamp out my bitterness toward another person. I keep crumbling under the self-imposed pressure to pursue a calling that I'm not sure really matters.

There are things that have been lost. 

Lost, Beth, lost. I tell myself again. It is not time for band-aids. It's time for regeneration.