Mundanity is prized with age

© 2022 Peter Free

 

20 January 2022

 

 

I just came in from picking . . .

 

. . . and partially pruning, the lemon tree.

 

It was the fourth fractional harvest of that tree, this year.

 

Another gathering remains.

 

These five defruitings are the result of locational differences along the tree's branched spectrum of sun and shade.

 

The tree was landscaped in, when this rental house was new. Foolishly crowded between two fences, a wall, and standing now under a towering false cypress tree.

 

These days, the lemons struggle to see any light at all. Most of that coming, only as the sun sets westward and pours over the board fence from that direction.

 

 

When I was young . . .

 

I wanted to escape this kind of laborious mundanity. Wishing instead to be somewhere else. Doing something purportedly more glorious.

 

Distant sunlight and imagined brighter colors were more interesting than what was under foot.

 

Now, I prize just being able to climb a ladder, walk back and forth to the bucket, stoop to fill it and — afterward and again — stretch rickety bones just enough to reach the fruit that I seek to pick.

 

All without falling, as I am increasingly prone to do, due to injuries that cannot heal.

 

 

Perspective changes with age's decline

 

The lemons, mostly orange-yellow in color, tell me so.

 

Their citrus smell lingers in faded senses. Soft-hard rinds lend an exquisite feel.

 

Sight of those oblong seed carriers — scars, scrapes, calluses and all — englows my life's rapidly declining energy.

 

Today's pail is, I suspect, fuller than before. Even though markedly smaller in dimension.

 

 

Is this paradox, or merely simple acceptance?

 

My core tells me (as it long has) that tenuously achieved distinctions, such as that embodied in that question, do not matter.

 

Certainly not, when there are baskets, bags or crates of one year's sunshine and rain to snip, pull, deleaf and pile.

 

 

Outside . . .

 

The lemon tree has taken on a mostly unburdened shape, again.

 

Will it miss me, as I will it —when in just a few months, I will be somewhere else and never coming back?

 

One wonders about connections.

 

And perhaps as often, where those lead. If anywhere.

 

I remind myself that what has a name, probably is not real. At least not in a destination's sense.

 

A full circle's many breaks, unbroken.