No More Peach Tree

No more peach tree. It was infested all up the trunks (there were multiple trunks due to poor pruning and management) with peach scale bugs that would have been difficult to treat, and after 8 years of losing crops to fungal diseases, we decided to call it quits.

I shed some tears as this was a symbolic tree, the one we bought after a second miscarriage. In truth, we can’t just burry our grief in the ground and expect it to grow something beautiful. We must tend to it with a watchful eye and sometimes sharp shears to manage its growth and changes in different seasons. Sometimes a lot of motherhood can feel like we can do nothing but burry our feelings for a time — the dreams, the hopes, the fears — and pray they will later pop up and grow into something beautiful.

But I’m learning our emotional lives must be cultivated and tended to just like plants in a garden. Sometimes there are things we must weed out because they deplete all the resources and bring little joy. Sometimes there are things we must prune back for the sake of stronger growth in the future. Some we must constantly nurture, maybe even sing to when no one is looking.