The young tree’s bark looked like it had been blasted by shrapnel. After it had survived a few winters, I had thought the tree tough enough to withstand the gnawing of our backyard critters—usually rabbits—so I’d removed its protective trunk covering. And now here it was, its bark shredded, tattered, peeled.
If I’d had a backyard surveillance camera, no doubt it would have sighted a much larger critter—probably a deer buck having wandered in from the nearby woods—scraping its velvety antlers across the newly-exposed bark of my young cherry tree, third in its line of succession.
For how long do we protect those we love? When do we tell them they’re on their own? And when do we know they’re gone?
* * *
An old cherry tree stood in our front yard when my wife and I moved into our house thirty-six years ago. It would bloom a brilliant white each spring, and then by July ruby red cherries magically lit it up like a midsummer Christmas tree.
The recipe for preparing them was simple: there was none. I might surrender a bag or two for a cherry pie or a fruit bread, but for the most part, the menu was simply tart cherries pitted and piled atop a bowl of cereal or ice cream, or stolen directly from the tree each time I passed beneath its branches while mowing the lawn.
I would freeze at least twelve bags of pitted cherries, pulling one out on the first of each month to enjoy them year-round.
Our oldest son loved to climb into its branches and sit there for hours. “What are you doing when you’re in the tree?” my wife would ask him. “Just thinking,” he’d say. What better response need there be? Although they didn’t like the tart cherries, all three of our kids as well as my wife would help me pick them. For a while. Then the task was mine to finish off.
Within a few years of our moving in, the tree began dying. Skeletal branches claimed more of the tree each year. So we planted a second front-yard cherry tree, tart of course, and watched it grow as the old tree slipped further toward death. We cheered the new tree’s first two cherries, then a handful the following season. Meanwhile the old tree finally died. It had not been a tree of our own planting, so I was not overly pained at cutting it down. But how do you explain this to your son, for whom the tree was his place to think?
The new tree grew quickly and soon took on almost legendary status in the neighborhood. For two weeks each summer, I’d climb the step ladder, straining to reach every last cherry. I picked cherries for several of our elderly neighbors and invited friends to share in the harvest. We live on a popular pedestrian avenue, so friends and strangers would walk, run, or bicycle past and see me on the ladder amid the cherries. It was a conversation-starter, followed by an invitation for the passerby to pick and eat a few—with fair warning as to their tartness.
The tree kept growing and producing more cherries. Finally, I gave in and declared that the cherries at its crown—which I could no longer safely reach—were literally “for the birds.”
The kids kept growing, too. They went to high school, they went to college, they went off to their separate lives. I kept picking cherries every summer.
Then the “new” cherry tree began aging. Bits of bark loosened from the trunk. Sap stained the lower trunk from some invisible wounds. One summer it hardly produced. Was it destined to be cut down as well?
Let’s wait and see, I told my wife. The first cherry tree had come with the property; this one we’d planted ourselves, and I’d invested three decades into its fruit. We consulted an arborist and tried this and that for a while but eventually decided to leave it to its own.
Just how long can you hold onto a tree? Just when does one let go?
* * *
A tree for which you’ve invested your sweat also serves as a marker of time. In the years since we planted that second cherry tree, I’ve had much to celebrate: wedding anniversaries, kids’ graduations, books published. But I have also lost my mother, my father-in-law, a sister, and—just last spring—a brother to death. Three of the neighbors to whom I gave cherries have passed away, one during the most recent cherry-picking season. A fourth neighbor hangs precariously on to life.
Our kids are grown, healthy, and doing fine—grafted, matured, and transplanted into their current lives. But as each one left home they left a hole behind, not unlike the empty space where the first tree once stood. I would like to freeze the joys and successes of their childhood years, and thaw just one memory once each month to re-celebrate throughout the year. But there were also worries, tears, and shredded dreams in those young years. Just the usual stuff of youth,—schoolyard problems, a spurned friendship, loss of a first girlfriend, the kind of things that bruise the heart, first of the child and then—probably more deeply—that of the parent. And their menu of present-day, young adult worries—again no different or greater than anyone else’s—remain my wife’s and my worries as well. If only we could call the arborist.
* * *
The front-yard cherry tree, the one we planted but had begun to age, has rebounded and has had at least two banner seasons since we first began to worry about its health. Passersby on the street still comment on its abundance.
Still, when we first discovered the old tree weeping sap and shedding bark, we planted that new, third, cherry tree in the back yard just in case. I cheered its first two cherries in its second year of growth. Our hope was that it would reach maturity by the time the old tree finally gave out.
When I discovered that morning that some young buck (caught in our imaginary surveillance camera) had gored it, had made shrapnel out of its bark, had almost completely girdled it, we consulted the arborist again. Again he said to treat it and wait to see what happens.
We expected it to die, leaving us with one old cherry tree up front, that one, too, perhaps on its way out. But buds formed on the tattered young tree this past spring, followed by brilliant white flowers, and then the green nubs and red fruit of cherries.
Maybe the cuts hadn’t gone too deep and the tree has healed itself. Maybe its future is nonetheless compromised, strained, and its years will be cut short.
But it’s alive right now, and so is the old tree up front. And in this season of harvest and loss, that is something to celebrate.
--- “The Cherry Trees” appeared in 3 Elements in their Fall 2025 issue.
