Rebirth and Renewal Outside

The Boston Globe

It survived the winter. I don't know how. Everywhere — across the street, down the street, all over town — bigger trees with longer histories and better pedigrees lay uprooted and dead, felled by ice and wind and cold.

My little pear tree — the one I bought at Polillio's in Stoughton nine springs ago, which fit in the back seat of the sedan I drove then, which I wrested out of the car and planted in a hole I dug in the middle of the front lawn, which grew thick and tall but never once flowered, but which I have increasingly loved every year since despite its lack of finery — is still here.

And I am awed by this.

Winter ravaged its limbs, buckled its branches, altered it. Last spring and all its other springs, the tree was pear-shaped and flawless, like something a child would draw, every branch symmetrical, no gaps, no holes. This spring, it stands taller, but it is flawed, a big chunk of its side missing.

You can see this if you're driving up the street, especially if it's afternoon and the sun is behind it. It would never win a beauty contest in this light. All you can see are imperfections. From the driveway, too, the tree looks bedraggled. People who stop by say, "Oh, your poor tree."

But from where I sit, from my office window, all I see is its beauty. It's in bloom now, for the first time ever, and its branches are thick with white flowers, filigree, but as dainty as lace. And I can't stop gaping. Bare and broken six weeks ago, it is now, for a little while anyway, a Cinderella dressed by some fairy godmother for an enchanted but all-too-fleeting royal ball.

My son-in-law sawed off so many broken limbs, more than we thought were damaged. And my husband and I dragged them into the woods behind our yard. They were heavy limbs. How does a tree not only survive this, but then bloom?

It's not a miracle, this life cycle, not in the way we define a miracle. But if you were new to this planet, if you landed here from some other galaxy where all you had known for your whole life was snow and cold and ice and frozen ground and bare trees, and you woke one day and saw a tiny sprig of green poking out of the dirt, and then a few days later, a little more green, and if this green then became a carpet? And if purple things sprouted from that carpet? And if trees that looked like match sticks, bare and scraggly and gray, suddenly burst into colors, pinks and yellows and violets, and the air grew warm, and the ground grew soft, wouldn't you swoon a little?

Outside my door, the world dazzles. And if I don't exactly swoon, I at least smile. But inside, the world hasn't changed at all. Turn on the TV and it's as bleak as December, the morning news, the evening news, all news the same. Only the names change, of people and places and battles to be fought. The newspapers? The Internet? More of the same. Politics and posturing. All morning, all night.

I open my front door and try to stay focused on the good that is right in front of me. Tulips. Azaleas. My flowering pear tree. My daughter stops by. "Your tree is in bad shape, mom," she says. "It's got a giant hole in its side." She parked in the driveway. She saw its flaws.

"Come here," I say, and she stands beside me. And for a while we both see from this perspective none of the world's flaws. All we see is perfection. Blue sky and green grass. Rebirth and renewal. Spring settling in. Finally.