Third: The Pear Tree

My grandfather always woke up early, usually between 4 and 5am, and that morning was no different.  I don't know how long he'd been awake when he shook my brothers and me and we rolled out of our sleeping bags, but it was still dark and there was a fire going in the ring of rocks in the middle of camp.  We sat for a few moments -- rubbing our eyes, listening to the music of the creek on the other side of the willows, drinking the hot chocolate he had made.  Then we tied our shoes and he stirred the fire down and we walked out of camp, leaving our grandmother still asleep in the motor home.  I was probably twelve years old.

He led us to an old dirt logging road, which we turned onto and walked along.  The lift of the mountain was on our left, the meadow through some pine trees on our right.  After about a mile, the trees began to thin, and the meadow opened up, and there, on the edge of the road, were two pear trees, which my grandfather walked right up to.  They were not nearly as tall as the pine trees, but they were tall enough to be old, and they looked wild and overgrown, not at all like the carefully pruned apple tree in our backyard back home.  In the dim light of dawn I could see the yellow fruit hanging from the live branches and littering the ground.

After a moment we continued on our hike, down the road and into the day.  But something about those trees, how they looked and where they were, stayed with me, and I've had a fondness for pear trees ever since.

***

Years later Lori and I bought a house, and couple of years after that we planted a pear tree in the backyard, in the corner where the patio roof meets the roof edge that hangs over our bedroom window.  If you look at the photograph at the top of my blog, you'll see that the pear tree is what frames the left side of my hexagon of sky.  Here is a photograph taken today of our pear tree, still with many of its leaves, some of them turning reddish and yellow and brown:

This tree is a fascination, like an old friend and a beautiful stranger at the same time.  In the spring the white buds come first, then the full blossoms, then the first fragile leaves near the flowers, then more leaves to fill out the rest of the tree.  One year, just as the tight balls of blossom potential were about to burst full, I wrote this haiku:

All night, pear blossoms

like pale paper lanterns

waiting to be lit.

Out of the sparse winter, the cold air and the low southern sun, tree branches harsh and bare, the spring makes something apparently, ineffably light.  A few months later, some of those blossoms have become pears, hanging heavy in the stillness of a September afternoon.  As I wrote in my field notes for Saturday, September 27, "Right now they hang heavily, like church bells waiting to ring, bombs ready to drop.  Their scale of time is different than ours, which makes them dangerous."

***

This year we had the most pears ever, somewhere between forty and fifty, if you count all the full, beautiful ones as well as the small and malformed fruit.  Here is a picture of a pencil drawing I made in my field notes journal, on Saturday, September 27, 2014, of a branch of our pear tree, the same branch that defines the lower left border of my hexagon:

Here is a picture I took of that same branch:

That branch has now lost all four of its pears, and, relieved of that weight, has sprung back higher into the air, even changing the dimensions of my hexagon of sky.  This tree and the world it shapes are never the same day by day.

***

Below is a picture of a single pear in the rain.  When I took that photograph three weeks ago, there were still over forty pears on the tree:

Less than two weeks ago, on Tuesday, October 7, this is what I wrote in my field notes:  "Over the past three or four days, two or three pears have fallen,  I brought them in to sit on a plate on the counter and continue to ripen.  One of these was from the branch I drew.  First thing this morning there was another on the ground, and mid morning another, so I went out and hefted the ones I could reach, and several more came off in my hand.  I filled another plate on the counter, there are now sixteen that have fallen, somewhere between 20 and 30 still on the tree."

Here are some of the bug-eaten and malformed pears that have fallen:

Here are the pears we're hoping will ripen into sweetness:

Here are the last two pears that never grew but still hang on:

Here is the last full pear left on the tree, Saturday, October 18, 2014:

Soon it will fall and the leaves will fall and the cold sun will shine through the thin, gray branches of the winter tree,

***

When I think now about the two pear trees I saw with my grandfather and my brothers at the edge of a meadow in the mountains, what occurs to me is the idea of someone trying to make a living, to make a home.  Those pear trees were not there by accident.  Someone planted them, someone with dreams of building something, putting down roots, farming the land, raising cattle, an orchard, a hay barn, children.  In the history of civilization, domesticating fruit trees and planting them near our homes may be among the most civil things human beings have ever done.  But let us not fool ourselves into thinking we have tamed them.  These trees have wild hearts and minds, which you will see if you watch one season after season.  And sometimes, one or two of these trees will go on living long after you've lost the ability to watch them, growing wilder and wilder at the edge of a meadow in the mountains, sharp and dead and unruly branches sticking out among the living, ripened fruit waiting for deer and bears and skunks to find, decomposing pears sinking slowly back into the soil, your hay fields choked with brush, your barn collapsed into dust, your children gone away, your farmhouse taken back by the land, your actual body that once ate pears now nourishing the earth by its own meager means.