Bittersweet Memories

BITTER FRUIT

Old pear tree, it has been one hundred and fifty years since youthful hands placed you in the once newly cleared ground where you now stand.

Though your bitter fruit was never palatable in all of your years, your blossoms have brightened the Spring mornings and your canopy of leaves have provided a cool refuge on blazing Summer days.
And though stormy winds have split you down the middle, and the termites have eaten your heart out, and you now have viney poison ivy entrails, you still hang on, closing up the rift with each of your wretched halves embracing the other.
Haggard old pear tree, you stand as a testament to the tenacity of life!
You are beautiful in my eyes!

Dan Bowlds

There is hardly anything left of the old place. The place where I grew up, and the place where our house stood. We called it "the old green house" because of the green siding that had been put on over the original weatherboarding. They tore the house down in 1966 while I was in the Army, off serving my country during the Viet Nam war. And in the early 70's, they strip mined all of the land around where it stood. They tore it up real good. All of the little ridges were leveled and the hollows were filled in and now none of the original landscape is recognizable. They did leave an old ornamental pear tree that stood in the back yard. It was always loaded with little bitter pears about the size of a walnut. The fruit was too "puckery" to eat off the tree, and Mom tried several times to make some kind of canned preserves or cook and sweeten it, but no kind of "doctoring" could make them palatable.

The ornamental tree was set out when the house was built, just before the Civil War. At that time this area was a wilderness. The house was completely built by hand. The trees to build it were cut down with axes and crosscut saws, the sills and joists were hand hewn, the wall studding was made from split rails, the flooring planks were split from logs and hand planed on the top side. The owners were no doubt proud of their house, and they wanted to decorate around it with ornamental trees and shrubs.
My Nephew bought the ground where the old house stood and cleaned it up with a chain saw and bush hog. He left the old tree standing because he had heard me say something in a casual conversation with his Dad (who is my brother) about it being the only thing left of our home place. The old tree was split open from a storm thirty or so years ago and the center of it has rotted out. Somehow the two split halves have managed to wind around themselves and they are now supporting each other. Also, I have noticed that poison ivy has grown up inside the hollow halves and has climbed up high in the tree before branching out into the tree's limbs. I was struck when I saw this, and being the hopeless nostalgic romantic that I am, I wrote a little piece about it called "Bitter Fruit".

Dan Bowlds