When my husband and I moved from Colorado to Llano, Texas in 2007, the plum tree in our front yard at Casita de Luz was a mere sapling, perhaps two or three years into its life, staked for support and surrounded by a grass-and-weeds lawn. Slowly, over the years from then until now, the tree grew heartily, welcomed the wandering purple heart I planted at its base, the mulch circle spiraling out from there, and eventually the replacement of a water-gulping lawn with ivy-type ground cover bordered with limestone block edges. Fragrant white blossoms appeared every spring, followed by bright green leaves, then the wonderful deep purple globed fruit manifested long before that of our peach, pear, fig and apricot trees. I must have made gallons of jam over the past thirteen years, giving much of it away to friends, visitors, and the local bed-and-breakfast establishments. And, in a somewhat secret and mystical way, the plum tree gave me emotional and spiritual support because the view from my meditation room window looked out upon it graceful branches and study trunk.
In time, however, wind and weather, and an invasion of bugs took its toll on the tree and it began to lose its inner strength. I mourned a little each year to see sap oozing from the insect wounds and branches turning brown, then dying off. Last fall, after doing usual maintenance, my husband and I decided it was time to let the tree go. With prayers of gratitude for its lovely life (most plum trees of this variety live to be about fifteen years old), I held the thick branches and my husband sawed them off by hand, leaving a rather odd but majestic looking two-foot stump with seven bulky spikes radiating upward. Later, he said, when the root system also gave up the ghost, we would remove what remained and perhaps plant another tree.
It is Spring again and everything all around us is in full bloom and leaf. To our surprise, despite age, illness, disease, and the look of death, the plum tree’s sap rose, creating amber-colored orbs against the dark bark. And there, on one stalwart hacked-off limb, a cluster of leaflets appeared along with a solitary bright white and shining blossom. Maybe it is strange how much joy seeing those green leaves gives me whenever I look out the window or pass by the front yard. I will wait and watch, wondering if that single flower will produce one more piece of fruit. If it does, what a miracle of life force determination that will be. More than anything else, the plum tree’s lesson to me is that life is a process and we give what we have in each moment, in each season, but death also is a process, one that comes in its own time and in its own way. Even that makes me smile and rejoice. The last plum. The last breath. Then the beginning of everything else.
~LJ