The Burden Of Bearing Fruit

LAST WINTER, as often happens in Bellingham, Washington, we got some terrible windstorms. A huge willow down the street from me split in two. The top half fell into the street, and road crews closed off Cornwall Avenue for several hours as they cleaned up the mess. Then a thick old fir smashed through the roof of my friend’s house, landing smack in the middle of her kitchen. The branches punched through the cupboards, reaching in like craggy arms and breaking her dishes. After that I stopped walking my dog in Cornwall Park — a thick grove of old-growth cedars and firs — as every tree now looked dangerous. The tops swayed in long arcs, and I wondered about the sturdiness of all those roots, at what point they might give way.

At home I eyed the trees around my house with suspicion. What about the hawthorn with its wizened, hollowed-out trunk? What about my own willow, the Rainier cherry? The Gravenstein apple stood far enough away from my house and the neighbor’s that it wouldn’t cause harm should it topple. And the copper beech — well, it gave off an aura of invincibility, with its wide trunk and its no-nonsense leaves still clinging to the branches despite the storms.

The two main suspects were the hawthorn — a tree I had never liked because of its thorns, its messy berries in the fall, and its not-quite-beautiful blossoms in the spring — and the Rainier cherry, which I adored. My neighbors had planted it forty years earlier; Dorothy, now ninety-eight, once brought over the receipt to show me what the sapling had cost back then: $7.95. Now it towered over the house with branches spilling out in every direction, a giant presence in my kitchen window every morning and evening as I ate my solitary meals. In the spring, fat cherry blossoms swelled on the limbs, filling both my downstairs window and the upstairs view. In April I could see the crown of my tree from blocks away as I drove home from work, and even after nine years the sight still gave me a flush of pride, an almost embarrassed satisfaction, as if the tree were welcoming me home with trumpets and banners.

I couldn’t imagine living without the cherry tree, but many experts had already given it a death sentence. Hardened streams of sap dripped from every opening in the flaky bark, indicating disease, or parasites, or both. These sap icicles were beautiful in their own way — translucent amber twisted into elegant shapes — but after a while they melted into sticky puddles on the grass. My arborist, Ruthie, told me in a note: “It’s been an honor to work on this magnificent tree, but I’m sorry to tell you that she’s terminal.” The cherry had given up providing fruit a few years earlier, but those blossoms still arrived every spring: heraldic, triumphant.

DECADES AGO I SAW a tree fall in the forest. I lived at Orr Hot Springs then, in northern California, a place situated in a steep river valley leading to the sea. During winter storms the river rose to dangerous levels, coursing in muddy waves below the bridge, and everything stayed damp: woodpiles, shoes, overcoats, hair. Down the road stood an old-growth redwood grove, and I often walked there in the rain to experience the contradictory dryness in the undergrowth.

One day I was walking along the road toward the grove with my lover. I hate the word lover, but it’s the only descriptor for this particular paramour. He was married, to my best friend, but before you judge me too harshly, let me make it clear that my best friend was having a dalliance with my live-in boyfriend too, and we had all agreed to this arrangement giddily, like children making up rules in a treehouse. And this was in northern California, a place to which oddballs have always gravitated. So our little “experiment” didn’t seem so strange. We all lived together in a community that revolved around the hot springs, and a sign on our front gate declared: “Warning: you may encounter nudity beyond this point.” We took turns cleaning the old bathhouse, the swimming pool, and the sauna, and staffing the front desk, an enormous slab of redwood polished to a high shine.

Still we had a lot of time on our hands, especially in the winter. We made clear ground rules, met a few times in each other’s houses after eating good meals and drinking wine from the local vineyards. We did tarot readings and threw the I Ching to divine the suitability of this arrangement, and though the answers were ambiguous (they always were), we chose to interpret them as “thumbs up!”

Only, my lover and I began making up our own rules as we went along. We knew we weren’t supposed to fall in love. We weren’t supposed to have secret trysts without them. But here we were, walking along a deserted road in the rain, holding hands. The drainage ditches filled like moats, and we could hear the evergreens shifting in the wind. The gray air smelled of resin and wildflowers, though the blooming season was still a good month off. Then the rain let up a bit, and we took off our hoods to hear each other better, as we were having a lovers’ quarrel: something about whether we should continue doing what we were doing, whether any good could ever come of it; and what about commitments, what about children, what about our futures, what about, what about?

We heard a crack in the woods. A gunshot? Hunters sometimes came up our road chasing deer, but deer season was a long way off. Then the cracking sound turned into a quavery moan, and we saw the tree falling. A big tree. A tree that disrupted the canopy in a messy shower of leaves and branches, plummeting with a swish and a thwump to the road in front of us. A huge fir tree, a good four feet across, blocking the entire road, its roots upended on the right, its crown lost in the creek to the left, its high branches waving wet needles.

One moment, a clear road ahead; the next, an enormous obstacle flung to block our way. I felt the ground shake, and my knees buckled. I sensed the vibration of the tree’s impact all the way up to my throat. If we hadn’t stopped to argue, if we had kept walking, kept holding hands, kept going down that path, the tree might have smashed us flat.

Even now, years later, I can feel the smell of sap burning my nose, hot and sharp in the cold, as if by falling the tree had set itself on fire. And out of my mouth comes I’m sorry! My lover, his mouth still gaping at the enormous tree, turns to me and asks what I’m sorry for. For everything, I say, and I hurry back up the road, back toward home. I want to tell my friend I’m sorry, and can I brush her hair? I want to tell her everything. I want to promise to keep my hands off her husband. And I want my boyfriend back. My lover trots to keep up with me, keeps asking why. I can’t explain it to him, not yet. But I will. Soon I’ll tell him that the tree was clearly an oracle telling us to stop — stop what we’re doing and go back.

WHEN I BOUGHT MY HOUSE, the cherry tree was laden with small green fruits, an alluring promise. I signed the papers in a flood of adrenaline — a single woman making a huge decision without anyone else as a buffer. It felt a little like I was giving in: finally buying my own house because I still hadn’t married, still hadn’t made a family. Some people told me the purchase would be a death knell for future relationships, that no prospective lover would want to get involved with me since I’d obviously declared my intent to be single forever. I wanted to retort, but didn’t, that maybe buying a home just meant I wanted a roof over my head forever.

When I’d first stepped into that little cottage on Cornwall Avenue, I’d gotten the “feeling” I’d heard so much about from other homeowners: a bodily sense that a house is yours. It descended upon me like a visitation — neither a tingle nor a flutter, but a wave of contentment and desire similar to a blush in the presence of someone you like. Someone you like a lot. I looked inside the two small bedrooms; I peered into the 
minuscule bathroom; I wandered upstairs to the attic loft, just large enough to stand up in. I peered out that upstairs window into the branches of the Rainier cherry. The house, I could tell, was only big enough for one, but one seemed like enough for now.

All this time my realtor, perhaps sensing the nearness of the Holy Spirit, wisely kept her distance, allowing the house and me a little time alone. Later she sat across the room from me and murmured, “It’s a good buy, such a great location, and what a yard!”

It was true, the yard was long and green, bordered by a field of blackberries and punctuated by both the cherry tree and the Gravenstein apple near the back fence. The city rose garden, visible from the front porch, was in full bloom, as if the town employed a crew of expert gardeners to plant and prune and mulch expressly for my enjoyment.

I signed the papers, cried for days, then set about making the house my home. Everyone who came over said of the cherry, “Great tree,” especially in July, when its fruit started to ripen. The squirrels and the birds took the lion’s share, mocking me by dropping half-eaten cherries on the patio and the lawn. I ate only the ones I could reach simply by pulling down a branch and plucking. I’d had Rainier cherries from the store, but these fruits were a surprise: the flesh so sweet and yet so complex; the firm skin giving way to the textured meat beneath; almost like a golden plum, but small and round and mine. The tree put out too much fruit for one person, so I invited friends over with buckets, bags, and colanders to take whatever they liked.

My friend Bruce clambered into the tree and shook the branches jubilantly, showering cherries down and bruising nearly every one, but we gathered them anyway and ate and ate. I brought baggies full as offerings to my co-workers. My puppy, in her first summer with me, eager to taste anything that would fit in her mouth, delicately took cherry after cherry on her tongue, and later I’d find piles of poop studded with oval pits. Certain this couldn’t be good for her, I maniacally swept up the fallen fruits several times a day, only to have more and more rain down.

Every April when my cherry bloomed, my parents called and asked, How’s the cherry doing? And I would say, It’s brilliant. I told them it made me happy. If you’re happy, we’re happy, they’ve always said, though now I felt an unspoken addendum:But are you really happy? What I didn’t say: The tree made me feel less alone. It made me feel as though I’d done something right.

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