pieces and ponderings

I just finished watering the flowers and fruit trees on our property.  The June temperatures in southern Alabama have been unreal…or maybe I should say, much too real.  It is so hot!  And it is so dry!

As I was watering our fruit trees, which are pretty young fruit trees, I noticed unusually dark brown leaves on one of our pear trees.  At first, the sight alarmed me, but then I remembered what had transpired a couple of days ago when child number 5 and I had been looking at the trees.  (The pear trees are just a couple of years old and this is the first year that any of them have produced any fruit and there are several pears on each of our four trees.)

We noticed that one of the trees was so laden with pears that the weight of the fruit had caused a branch to break.  It was hanging by a very thin branch thread to the trunk of the tree.  I raised my hand to touch the drooping branch and it broke off in my hand.  My son carried the broken branch into the house with all of its underdeveloped pears.  We didn’t really know what to do with it.  Throwing it away was the right thing to do, but that was difficult because of all of the baby fruit that was on it…so as I said, we took it into the house.

Child number 1 saw us coming into the kitchen with the broken branch laden with pears.  “What’s that?”  He asked, and we explained to him the sad saga of the skinny branch on the young fruit tree that was unable to bear the fruit it had been blessed with.

“Duct tape,” was his response to my sad story.

“What did you say?” was my response to his response.

“I think we can duct tape the branch back to the tree,” he replied.

“Really?” was my spoken response, as my mind thought about his solution.

I had flashbacks to his childhood.  Child number 1 had always loved duct tape.  He had found many uses for duct tape in his growing up years…some good…some not so good.  He was convinced that duct tape could fix anything.  Evidently, he still held to this belief, and out the door he headed with a large roll of duct tape and child number 5 following along behind, still carrying the broken branch.

I remained in the house, hoping against hope that perhaps the duct tape just might work and a miracle would occur and the branch would become grafted back onto our tall, but skinny pear tree, and child number 1 could look at me with a grin and say, “See, I told you it would work.”

Fast forward to the day that I’m watering the fruit trees and looking aghast at the tree with the dark brown, dead leaves.  “Oh, it’s that tree,” I realize and walk over to get a closer look.

When I get to the tree, I find an expertly executed taping job connecting a dead branch to a skinny pear tree.  It was a good try, a marvelous attempt.  I applaud the effort…and now I have to figure out how to remove the heavily duct-taped dead branch from my skinny pear tree.