Don't Bury It

I walk down the back lane, then home, up through the orchard, spring and I making small talk, getting to know each other again. I wander and she warms. Winter, all uncomfortable, fades, a wet towel skulking off.

She’s left her dirty secrets behind, sheathed around the Golden Delicious apple, the Barlett pear, strewn across orchard’s soggy carpet.

I kneel down on wet grass, peer close at evidence scattered.





We planted the first of this orchard, a pair of apple trees, Northern Spy and Empire, in heavy light of a June dusk.

I can still see the wild poppies hanging in the gilded still, Caleb, just two, running through grasses taller than him, picking scarlet petals. Farmer Husband dug up dirt and carefully placed fragile rootballs in earth opened up. Worms and roots tangled and we covered them up in soil. I took a picture, Caleb standing beside his two fruit trees. How tall would trees and son be ten springs from now? I had no imagination for the impossible. These days were golden.

For the last twelve orbits around the sun, after each of the children had made two complete rides, held up two pudgy fingers, happy sign of aging, we’ve planted another two fruit trees in the orchard for each of them. They’ve all smiled for the camera. Time would bear fruit on limbs, in lives.

I’ve never been able to quite imagine.

I pick up a handful of dead grass, refuse from tunneling , limp blades cutting sharp. I try to envision: When snow fell this January and polar air bared down and we stirred mugs of hot chocolate in lantern light’s flicker, field mice came in from stubble of wheat fields, burrowed through dormant grass deep under snow.







We read stories by the hearth, blankets pulled over laps, and the rocking chair creaked. They wound runways, scarred ground with their bellies tunneling along the earth.

I pulled old woolens, my grandparents’, his too, up over patched quilts and children curled in sleep and only the wind moaned through the night. I slept and never heard their nocturnal gnawing. Mice who bared sharp edge of teeth and sunk into periderm tissues, chewed through the phloem tubes, sucked back the juicy cambium.

Dare I touch tree’s wounds?

Tenderly, I trace teethmarks, flesh bitten deep.

How many nights of this methodical mutilation? How many mice to girdle these trunks with voracious hunger? How did their tummies swell here under the snow? They devoured the tissues that transport fruit tree’s leaf food to roots, and with no bark to transport air food to earth roots, the trees will die a death of slow starvation. One gorges and one starves.

Was it the moan of the trees I heard on January nights?

That night at dinner, we sit at the table and gaze out to the orchard. Each child intimately knows his trees, her trees. Last spring, Tall Girl had counted the number of cherry blooms, her mouth dreaming pies.

The gashes blaze in last light.

“Mine too?” Tall Girl’s chin quivers.

“I wrapped them in tile, but around some of them, the mice crawled up from underneath.” I can hear the apology in Farmer Husband’s voice, the ache. He turns from the window, turns towards Hope. “Yes, I think your cherry trees, too.”

Her chin gives way. It’s been eight long years, her and those trees stretching up. My grief nods to hers and she whispers through tears, “I so wanted that fruit.” Our sadness meets.

And when children sleep and I pull up the covers on late March night, I lay in bed and listen to the last of the snow trickling away in the dark; lay in bed and think about what lies below a surface of a life, tunneling, gnawing, eating us up. About fruit that’s never bore. About dying a slow death.

I can hear spring's wind blowing up through the orchard.




Lord, expose what needs to be exposed in our lives … because what’s buried deep can kill the fruit.