Outside in our little orchard today, the one my late husband and I planted together six years ago, sweat running down our backs as the heat rose up from the ground to meet us, I noticed that the grape vine I bought him for Father’s Day several years ago had sprung to life again. Though every year it looked as if it would die, he tended it, digging around it, building a little trellis for his vine that never produced any fruit.

I went out pruning because the weather was cool, a good day to get those low-lying branches on the apple tree off the ground. With my hand pruners, I began trimming here and there, finally running into a bough so pregnant with green fruit that it touched the dirt. “Tsk,” I said to it, knowing it would have to be sacrificed for the good of the tree.

Where were my big tree trimmers? Last year I’d had two, short-handled and long-handled; but this year, they were nowhere to be found. Some child had doubtless taken both to the forest, working on some fort or project, and they lay out there, rusting.

I returned to the tree, grunting with effort. The branch wouldn’t budge. Going back to the pool house for the hand saw, I felt tears threatening behind my eyes.

“Why is everything so hard?”

Back at the tree, saw in hand, I attacked the branch with vigor, determined to be the woman as strong as those who came before me, whose strength and survival I appreciate as I stand here, saw in hand. But the saw had a mind of its own and wouldn’t cooperate. It cut here, there, over here again, criss-crossing the branch until the branch looked as scarred and beleaguered as I’ve felt since my husband died. 

I felt near tears. Was I going to cry about it or find the proper tool?
I threw the saw on the ground and marched to the barn, where my husband’s shop is (was), and where my son-in-law and the workers for the company I had owned until last week were loading cabinets, tools, and machinery into the van I also signed over to him because I’d no longer need such a large vehicle. The workers turned their backs to me, reinforcing my feeling of being a discarded appendage of the man they called their boss, emphasizing as if in bright lights the message, “UNWANTED,” the mandate to GET LOST.

My son-in-law greeted me and I told him haltingly that I needed pruners, feeling a stranger on my own property. He looked at me quizzically.

“Pruners, the big ones,” I began with fragmented a fragmented sentence. “I’m pruning the apple tree, the branch is on the ground,” I gestured vaguely. “The kids must have taken mine, so I wondered if they’re down here.”

We looked around but found no pruners, so cussed the kids together and laughed a little. He began walking toward the house with me, to the orchard. “I can do it,” I said weakly, knowing I couldn’t do it without the big pruners. We arrived at the tree and he held his hand out for the hand pruners. I put them in his hand and with one heft, he had the offending branch off.

Tears came to my eyes, but I turned away so he wouldn’t see
I’m weak, and yet here I am, left to handle such a big property without my big man.

This is what I thought. I thanked my son-in-law and he recommended more locks on the tool sheds. I thought to myself that maybe fewer children would be the practical solution, but kept this little joke to myself.

I continued with my pruning, doing what I could with my weak woman’s hands and my small hand pruners. As I pruned, tears ran down my face for the first of what I was sure would be several crying jags throughout the day. As I made my way from tree to tree, an unhappy peace settled on me: This is the way things are now that my husband is dead. I don’t know how they will be in the future. I only know how they are now: they’re difficult and terrible, and my loneliness is intense even while surrounded by family and friends. They all have one another, and they have me; but I have no one whose always-open arms welcome me. The one whose arms always welcomed me is dead.

Arriving at the grape vine, I examined it to see whether it needed any pruning. Its little tendrils had grown here and there, anchoring it firmly to the wire trellis my husband built. Suddenly I noticed foetal grapes growing underneath first one leaf, then another, and then another: our first grapes. Grapes my husband didn’t live to see, grapes I would harvest.

“Look at these, sweetie,” I murmured to him. “Just look at what’s growing now.”