IF IT COULD ONLY TALK

As I stand here all alone I wish I could talk and tell my tale of the many years I have stood here bearing fruit that no one notices. I have stood here, it seems, like from the beginning of time.

I stand here quietly and make not a sound as I watch quietly the world around me come and go these many years. When I was young, I was planted on a hill overlooking the new farm. now old and mostly abandoned. Alone with my other two pear trees that are just as old, and like humans, we too have grown old and abandoned. No one comes to visit us anymore and we are sad and just stand here growing old and useless except when we bloom in the spring with a few flowers only to be visited by the bees to gather pollen and use it to make honey in some far away hive. At least we are still good for something to help the world.

The few pears we do make fall to the ground and feed the animals that do visit us from time to time as we stand alone. We are next to an old building that used to be a chicken house and full of life but that too is gone. The land has not been looked after in many years and is now so grown up with new weeds and trees that we have become almost invisible. I wish it was like it was many years ago but maybe someone will come along who is young again and find us. Maybe they will prune back the old and dead branches and then we can put forth new branches.

Once upon a very long time ago, this farm was given as a land grant by some king in the 1700s before the state of Missouri was even part of the United States. Indians and dinosaurs used to roam this valley long before that. Then it was isolated and secluded and tucked away out of sight just as it still is to this day.

This old land hidden away was then loved and sacred and as I stand here I can hear the past. I hear and remember the people. First, the Indians that lived here and used the one hill made of special stone that they used to make tools and arrowheads. Then the white man was given the land and ruined it for them. They built an old house and barns from hand-hewn timbers. Not big barns just little ones. They built a smokehouse next to the spring on the farm that came down the hill behind me where I and the other two pear trees sat.

The chicken house now sits sad and forlorn and empty also just like us the pear trees. Old and forgotten. And once when someone lived here they put two puppies on short chains in the chicken house and forgot to feed and water them and they died. And when the woman returned she found two skeletons covered in fur with chains wrapped around their necks. She had been gone many years and did not know what abuse had gone on in that little old chicken house. She was heartbroken to think about the suffering of those two young dogs that were starved to death.

As I sit here I have seen a lot in my many years as a pear tree, now old too and forgotten but the lady remembers me and the other two pear trees. She is not able to visit us anymore but she loved us then and loves us still as she writes our story.

Where we stand alone we are not really alone because our relatives grow here on the hill too. In fact, they have pretty much consumed all that is around us. They are called Bradford pears.

But this land has seen much more. It saw the Civil War fought on this land. Cannonballs were found deep in the ground where they lay buried for years. And there are even 2 unmarked rock graves here on the farm from the Civil War. Best to leave them undisturbed I think.

The old farmhouse is gone. The cornfield that once grew is gone. The two little barns and the smokehouse are now gone. The people who moved in after the old farmer built a house underground and then when the land was sold again in 1980 to the old woman who once was young then that house could not be lived in and had to be dismantled. She kept pictures as they brought her children and came on weekends where they lived like pioneers camping in the open air. They took it down to the bare concrete foundation always in hopes they would build on it but it was never to be.

The children grew up too fast and left. The woman grew old and disabled and her husband died. She had many farm animals and we miss them grazing up here on the hill.

Her children grew up and left her and now she is all alone. She took care of her mother for 5 years who had strokes.

Then she decided to go to college and become a nurse. She went away after graduation and after her mother died and no one took care of the farm as she did. She loved her farm and her land and she loved the three of us pear trees. She still loves us and thinks about us all the time. But her spinal cord injury keeps her from doing what her heart wants to do but her body can't do anymore because like me, the pear tree, she is old now. And like me, she has only her memories but like me, the tree has many offspring.

The bees and insects that gathered my pollen took it to the Bradford pears and we created a new breed of pear. It is big like the crabapple and hard and sweet like the old-fashioned hard sweet sugar pears I and my other two pear trees used to bear.

So, like all things, we may be old and forgotten but we have left behind a new legacy just like my old lady that still remembers us and now eats of the fruit of my new creation.

We may all grow old and useless and forgotten and one day, only a memory, but we leave a bit of ourselves in what we leave behind.