Hallelujah Fruit

It looks like there will be fruit this year.

Hallelujah.

Because last year in our little town?

There was none.

No pears, no apples, no grapes, no quince, no tiny plums.

It took awhile for me to realize this last year. I had to check with my neighbors to see if I was just being terrifically unobservant. Like maybe there had been loads of fruit and I was too distracted and busy to notice it?

But no. We all agreed. The trees didn’t fruit last year.

I worried about our local animals, our bears and foxes and skunks, who managed to survive one year without their normal sustenance. But two? What would happen if there was no fruit again? 

I noticed on my walk last week that my neighbor’s pear tree had teeny tiny pears on it. The plum trees in my backyard also have little plums.

So this year? There is fruit. And flowers! So many flowers are blooming. The perennials in my front yard came back like never before, and they are alive with all kinds of winged creatures: birds, bees, ladybugs, wasps, moths.  I’ve planted perennials for years, and they’ve usually done OK, but they always seemed a little tired and blah. Like they had to work hard just to survive. This year they are thriving. It’s hard to know why everything seems so alive now. Maybe it’s all the snow and rain that fell in winter and earlier this spring?  Maybe it’s because we took down a poplar tree last fall that was casting shade onto the flower beds?

Or maybe it’s love?

I like to think that the flowers know that they are loved. I am especially pleased that the native bleeding hearts that I transplanted from my mom and dad’s house years ago are blooming and spreading. They are maybe my favorites. They come back every year, even when I’ve thought that they were done for. (Isn’t this true for all of us in a way? We had Covid and lockdowns and an unfortunate president. But somehow? How? We are still here. Even when we thought we were done for.)

It’s not like this means that anything has changed with the climate crisis. It just means that this year we had a sort of reprieve in the form of massive amounts of rain and snow that filled empty reservoirs and temporarily helped California’s never ending drought. There was grace in the rain that came, and the snow and the snow, and grace in the wild rushing rivers that are higher than I’ve ever seen them, and that there is still snow in the mountains on this June day.

Somehow beauty and grace and life find a way. Grace is sneaky like that.

Even though we’ve made a mess of the planet and it’s not how it was. Not how it’s supposed to be.  But it is what it is, and grace still finds us. In the birds at the feeders and the bees and the butterflies and the bleeding hearts that die and somehow still come back every year.