We should have done it years ago. Planting fruit trees that is…
But we dragged our feet awhile before getting down to business with peach, plum, and apple. What I didn’t know until now is even though a fruit tree won’t bear fruit for years upon getting it first in the ground, seeing the fruit tree grow will be a marvelous thing regardless. The leaves quietly springing from its gangly stem seem to whisper,
It’s worth the wait, but waiting isn’t always the doldrums. See?
And it’s this time of year I love. Garden of Green Fables is heavy with the goodness that has been and the goodness that still is, but it’s spent and it’s tired.
Harvest is looking at all the blessings in the year and all the work done and how the garden bloomed in June, bustling with life in its heyday, laden with flowers in blistering summer, worn by the sheer beauty of bursting for months on end. Green Fables looks at impending cold and darkness straight on and it still blooms, still is, still roots down steady.
No other season finds me this sprawled in the grass, or this pressed into the damp ground as I listen to my children play, and stare at the oaks above. I notice how the light catches. How the oaks will be bare soon.
But today the sky is blue and harvest is still in its long crescendo calling you to listen, to look, to see. It won’t beg, though. If you miss it, you miss it. And it goes on being beautiful and radiant without you.
The year the old oak fell and spring flowers grew young beneath its wizened summers, we put sticks in the ground and called them trees. In the autumn, I walked into peach leaves and it was a tree indeed.
We dreamt up fields of zinnias but they had other plans and grew like weeds in the rose bed instead. At four in the morning, chasing off deer, we’d hoist and pull taut gnarled old wire and get melons and tomatoes to the table.
Red roses blooming and purple mums coming, but fading fast daisy gets uprooted and hydrangea had its lovely first season but dies hard and I wonder if that’s the end of that and of the daisy too…
And so it goes I can never quite put my finger on hope, but I’m always putting it in the ground, always hearing it in thunderstorms, always watching, but always surprised and spring always comes and somehow the harvest began its slow and radiant work when the old oak fell in a winter storm.
-S.V.F.
Peach leaves join the oak trees and I don’t miss a thing. Not harvest in its glory. Nor harvest in its adolescence. I count the year’s gold by the blooms I can’t even recall. I just remember it has been good. Very good, indeed.
I guess this is how it feels to be in the “good ole days” and to know it.
Story Behind Garden of Green Fables
(how we came by the name + our love story)
The Dead Tree & Other Reflections of Life
(more about the old oak tree that fell – death isn’t the end)
(a striking word visual and a gut-honest faith journey laid out before you in 17 poems)
Sierra V. Fedorko 
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