Home Sweet Home

A pear tree stands at the end of the driveway to my childhood home. A tree that always hangs heavy with fruit, year after year.

I remember being six and helping my mother pull pears from the tree. I concentrated on the lower branches, my small hands quickly overflowing with the fruit. My mother stood on her tiptoes to reach the fruit higher up, her long floral skirt billowing around her ankles. We dropped the fruit into a metal bowl as we went along, laughing when we caught sight of our reflections, warped on the sides of the bowl like a funhouse mirror. I held the bowl full of fruit, weak arms buckling under the weight as I surveyed our harvest. Green speckled pears, the bottom half full and curved with sweet flesh. I carried the bowl back inside and stood on a stool in the kitchen with my mother as she made apple and pear crumble. I gorged myself until my stomach swelled like those pears.

I remember being eight and having to run. Ducking under the shade of the pear tree to get into the car, staring blankly out of the window as it drove off, carrying my mother, my brother, and me away. Away from the violence that had made itself a home within the walls of our house. I wonder if my father ate any of the pears off the tree while we were away. Probably not.

I remember being ten, now far too big to have fantasies of climbing the pear tree. But I did it anyway, wanting so desperately to feel like a child again, how I did in summers past, innocence radiating from my every gesture. I ignored the bending of the spindly branches, the way the entire tree was leaning further and further towards the ground, until my mother’s voice rang out from an open window upstairs. Get down from there! The words shattered the still August heat, and I did as I was told, splinters riddling the growing skin of my palms.

I remember being twelve and using the cover of the pear tree to hide my tears from the men at our front door, demanding money from my parents who simply didn’t have it. I later found that they were debt collectors. The very concept confused me. Why chase after people who don’t have what you want? Money doesn’t grow on trees, and it certainly doesn’t materialise from intimidation. Couldn’t they just take some pears and call it even? But even at that age, that thought sounded silly. The world doesn’t work like that, my father had said later, when I had presented my childish solution. He didn’t meet my gaze. I was becoming used to those wandering eyes. It never has, it never will. That night in bed, I imagined a world where it did work like that. Where money grew on pear trees.

I remember being sixteen and staring at the pear tree from the front door, watching as the fruit-laden branches moaned in the breeze. We had stopped picking the fruit, and the tree retained it all, hoarding its spoil. I wondered if it hurt the tree, to carry all its burdens like that. I imagined myself crossing the driveway, picking fruit from the branches swaying at my eye level, the branches that had once been way out of my reach. But I didn’t. I no longer liked pears.

I remember being eighteen and watching my parents cut the branches off the pear tree. The fruit was rotting, falling to the ground to create a sticky layer under their feet. Ants had invaded the bark, burrowing deep within its layers, claiming it as their own. I watched as my mother sprayed chemicals across its trunk. I felt sorry for the tree, for being poisoned inside and out. I stood at my bedroom window and wondered if there was anything I could do to help it, this keeper of my childhood memories. Then I wondered how much other people would judge me if I voiced these thoughts out loud. Pear trees don’t have feelings, I could almost hear them say.

Now at twenty, I take one last look at the pear tree before loading one more box into the back of my parent’s car. My father told me the day before that the tree was too sick to keep, that it was spreading its disease to the other trees, and that he would cut it down soon. I walked over to the tree and suddenly found myself awfully attached to it. I reached out to place my hand against the trunk, then stopped. The bark was warped, cracked, sticky with the trails of slugs and the nests of flies. Time had changed it, as it had also changed me. I recalled my childish hopes, hopes of trees feeling no pain. I hoped that its end would be beneficial, not only to itself but to the other greenery surrounding it. Or that, miraculously, it would get better, and stand taller than ever before. My eyes swept its surface one last time before I opened the car door and got in, feeling as small and helpless as I did that summer twelve years ago. I imagined my dad taking a chainsaw to the pear tree, and my memories spilling from the chipped bark. I imagined them liberated, floating away in the air, set free to settle in another pear tree, one that was healthy and flourishing. I imagined the pear tree, my pear tree, falling silently, no one around to hear its final groan. I imagined the driveway to my childhood home without the pear tree. I choked back tears as I stared out of the car window.