Mama's Pear Tree

The perfect storm had catapulted my parents to the home of their dreams. In one fell swoop, Mama had been diagnosed with MS, Daddy had lost his job, and due to a major misunderstanding that would take years to sort out, Grandpa had disowned Daddy and more or less uninvited him to all family gatherings ad infinitum. As grandkids, we were still invited, but we stood with our Daddy and Mama stood with her man. Then our landlord decided that he would rather have his kids live in our house than us, and in the space of one month, we had no job, no house, and no extended family. And Mama was sick.

"We're moving to another state!" Daddy announced at dinner as we sat around on boxes with our plates on our knees. We looked at Mama. Her eyes were sparkling she was so happy. We could see her spinning dreams, and when your Mama starts spinning dreams, everyone gets swept up in her shining wake. So we moved to the dream-house—a run-down 80-year-old house on a hobby farm.

Mama believed in living things, and her first move was to purchase plants of all kinds. Even a sapling can be expensive, but she was dreaming of twenty years from today when a seed she had planted had been given space to grow like a child. So she did it her way. She bought seeds and she visited orchards and cut suckers on the sly to grow in buckets. Apples and raspberries and peaches, to start. But it was the pear tree already growing in the backyard that received the bulk of her affections. It had been neglected and was overgrown. It was in desperate need of pruning.

Mama lavished all her gardening skill on that pear tree and hoped beyond hope that we would have pears that first autumn. She didn’t expect anything from her other, tiny trees, of course. She got her tomatoes and potatoes and spinach and runner beans and beets (which we hated)—but no pears.

Mama’s MS was complicated by other problems the next Spring. But her canned and frozen goods kept us all the up to the summer when we started harvesting again. Her garden was bigger this year, and she was insisting that all us kids learned to can tomatoes. We actually got pretty good at it while she split her time between showing us and watching. There were no pears that year, either. I looked out the window one day and saw Mama standing under the pear tree, leaning on her cane in a sort of longing way, and I could have sworn she was talking to it. When I turned away from the window, I bumped into Daddy, who was watching her, too. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.

By the next Spring, the pear tree was flourishing and blooming like a bride. We rolled Mama out under it in her wheelchair so she could give gardening directions from there. She looked like an empress in a flowering pagoda. We spread a big rug for her chair, had a small table with tea, and the cat and dog abandoned us in the hot garden for Mama’s sweet, cool presence. That Spring, I definitely heard her talking to the tree, sweet-talking pears out of it. By then, we were all holding our breath over it. The tree leafed out that summer and we watched carefully for little green buds where the flowers had been. Not a nubbin. Sometime one evening when I got out of bed to go to the bathroom, a light outside caught my eye. A flame under the pear tree. I dashed for the back door but stopped when I saw Daddy. All the childhood instincts that teach you by observing soundlessly kicked in and I eased out the squeaky screen door the only quiet way. Daddy was standing like a bad man at high noon, holding a torch instead of a gun—and he was facing off with the pear tree. “Listen here, you,” he denounced the pear tree. “My wife wants pears in the worst way, and she—” he choked a little. “She’s not doing well. And she…she…she put a lot of work into you. She thinks you’ll have beautiful pears this year. Well, HEAR THIS. If there aren’t pears THIS YEAR…I’ll burn you down. All the way! Understand??” The leaves of the tree flickered in the light of the torch. Then Daddy turned on his heel and went to the trash barrel, where he tossed the torch in.

Mama died that summer, in the high roasting heat of August. After the funeral, I sought comfort in the only cool place I could find—the pear tree. I climbed high into that gnarly old thing in a vague hope to be closer to Mama, suspended somewhere between Heaven and the lower branches of the tree. At first, I thought I was just seeing through fuzzy, wet eyelashes. But I blinked and rubbed my eyes and it was still there: a pear. An honest-to-goodness pear.

Boy, did we baby that tree. We staked it out against bugs and critters of all kinds. Anytime the dog went near the tree, someone yelled at him. The cat was terrified to sharpen her claws anywhere. A month later, we split the pear between all of us, and it was the sweetest piece of fruit I’ve ever had. The tree was allowed to live out its last years in peace, well-pruned and flowering every spring—but never bearing fruit again.

But we knew that it was grateful to Mama and had done what it could. And it was enough.