Abundant Fruit
By Cara Stolen
@carastolen
What’s your favorite state?
I wonder who will be in my class next year.
How did you pick your college?
I think I want to run for Student Leadership Council this year.
It’s one of those milestones that sneaks up on you. One day you’re playing chauffeur, tossing snacks to the backseat and refereeing fights between your tiny passengers, and the next you’re an Uber driver with a not-so-tiny passenger riding shotgun.
Is hail more like snow or more like rain?
Can you remind me to check the water trough when we get home?
Mom, look at that crazy sprinkler!
Do you like your job?
I can’t wait to wrestle in high school.
And, in my case, my eleven-year-old passenger, my oldest son Royce, has musical opinions, route comments, questions, and haphazard musings. But reading between the lines, they aren’t all aimless questions or random musings. They’re glimpses of dreams. The inklings of plans. The sketchings of his future.
***
There’s an old orchard at our new house. Cherry, pear, plum, and several varieties of apple trees, all nestled in next to the creek, where the family who homesteaded this land knew their roots would stay wet even on a drought year.
This spring, I anxiously awaited their blooms, enticed by the idea of fresh fruit in our front yard. I dreamed of pies and jams and crisps. Muffins and applesauce. Maybe canned pie filling for the cold, dreary months. The blooms came and went and finally, in late June, the branches of our cherry trees hung heavy with fruit. We pulled out the picking ladder some previous owner had left in the barn, and we picked (and ate) to our hearts’ content. Except then we left for a six-day trip to a wrestling camp in Montana, and aside from one tiny batch of homemade cherry chocolate chunk ice cream, I never got around to canning or baking much of anything.
The fruit left on the trees grew dark and shriveled, eventually shrinking to inedible hard pebbles that hung on the tree and littered the ground.
Wasted.
***
The kitchen table at my parents’ house sits, to this day, in exactly the same spot it did when I was growing up. Tucked into the southeast corner, to the right of the kitchen door, under the two corner bay windows. My seat at the table was along the long edge, facing the window that looks out across the lawn, the two apple trees, and the pasture below. It was from this chair that I sketched my own future, starting when I was Royce’s age.
I imagined my life as a math teacher or an interior designer. A lawyer or a scientist. As I got older, I dreamed of studying abroad, attending Georgetown University, and living in New York City. I envisioned stylish outfits and sky-high heels just like Reese Witherspoon in the opening scenes of Sweet Home Alabama. Then settling down with my high school boyfriend in our hometown just like Reese Witherspoon at the end of Sweet Home Alabama. At one point, I contemplated an organic chemistry post-doc or an enology graduate program. Briefly, I thought about pharmacy school.
The possibilities were endless in a way that excited and enticed me. My life stretched out before me, an endless expanse of options and opportunities, all ripe for the choosing.
***
It is easily my least favorite venue from which to wait for my kids to finish a sports practice: the city pool. It’s hot, humid, the viewing area is tiny without much “view” of the pool at all, and the seating consists of two convertible half-table benches and a stack of plastic chairs. Whenever possible, I avoid it altogether, opting to drop my oldest two kids off for swim practice and run errands with my youngest, Reid. But for some reason, on this particular day, I stay.
I don’t remember what prompted the conversation about going back to school, just that I found myself sitting between two moms who had, either previously or currently, made the decision to do so.
“Do you ever think about it?” Tyson’s mom asks me.
“Oh, sure. I think about it all the time,” I answer.
“Would you go back for an MFA?” Claire’s mom asks.
“Maybe,” I say noncommittally, glad to see my kids climbing out of the pool and an end to this conversation in sight.
I prattle on, my tendency to overshare getting the best of me. “I mean, the smart thing to do would be to go back to pharmacy school or get a teaching certificate to teach high school chemistry or math. Or maybe get an accounting degree. But I think I’d be more interested in some kind of sports nutrition program. Exercise science, maybe. I don’t know, I think about a lot of things, I just can’t ever really choose, so I just keep doing what I’m doing …” I drift off, and get to my feet.
“It just seems so … hard. And tiring.” I say, before adding, “see you guys on Thursday” and letting the door into the lobby shut behind me.
***
This spring, I spent fifteen or so minutes at our local feed store, pondering the purchase of a bird feeder with a camera. I’ve checked out no less than four gardening books from the library this summer. My recent Google searches include things like “how to boost nitrogen content of garden soil” and “best practices for composting chicken manure.” I’m already envisioning the way I’ll lay out my garden beds next spring, and I have a reminder on my phone to plant both tulip bulbs and garlic this fall.
I’ve started talking about running a 50-mile trail race before I turn forty in a few years, and recently added a weekly “hip mobility” routine to my workout schedule. I used Chat GPT the other day for the very first time, asking it to help me build a weekly running schedule that incorporated my weekly Pilates class.
I keep a list in my notes app of mountains I’d like to climb and backpacking trips I’d like to go on. I have a Pinterest board with tattoo ideas, and have been daydreaming about an extravagant trip we may or may not be able to afford for our 15th wedding anniversary next year.
Maybe it’s not going back to school. Or changing careers. But they’re still dreams. Important plans. Just, smaller scale, and less Sweet Home Alabama themed.
***
In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath famously writes:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Wasted.
***
It’s my favorite routine of the summer: watering the garden while drinking coffee and talking to my friend Rachel on the phone. On this particular day in July, I’m bemoaning my dying pea plants, my kids’ fighting, and the cherries I let go to waste.
Rachel also has fruit trees, and she tells me she never gets around to using all their cherries. She says it nonchalantly, as though it never occurred to her to feel obligated to use them all, and I feel my mind start to shift.
The cherries we left on the tree fed birds, squirrels, deer, and countless other animals. The ones that fell to the ground fed ants and beetles and will decompose and add nutrients back into the soil.
By the time we hang up and I walk toward the house, I’m no longer beating myself up over what I couldn’t use. Couldn’t get to. Those cherries may have stayed on the tree and shriveled up, but they weren’t really wasted at all.
***
I thought about Sylvia Plath and her fig tree an inordinate amount this summer. In the quiet moments of my day, it would, somehow, find me.
My life no longer seems to stretch out endlessly ahead of me, the way it did when I was young. It doesn’t seem short, necessarily, or even close to over. Just, finite. Limited.
And I wonder: Do you really only get to eat one fig from the tree of life? Will the figs I leave untouched go to waste?
All my contemplating leaves me experiencing a weird combination of feelings that I describe to my therapist as “melancholy contentment.”
***
As fall grows nearer, the kids find other fruit trees on the property. Mostly apple trees, found up and down the creek. They’re markedly different in stature from the pruned, uniform trees of the orchard, and they grow thirty, forty feet tall in places.
We decide they were likely planted by birds, left unpruned, and grew without restriction. But we all took note—their fruit is smaller, and more bitter, than the other apple trees.
***
On a run one morning I contemplate the difference between a pruned and unpruned fig tree, and wonder how that fits into the metaphor.
I picture Royce standing at the foot of his own sprouting tree. It's not a seedling anymore, but it isn’t full grown either. It’s young and healthy and full of potential.
I imagine my own tree. Not young, but not yet old, either.
I recall the image of my kids picking cherries: a ladder leaning against a branch selected for its abundance, their chins and fingers stained purple, each child eating to satiation from the fruit within reach, entirely unbothered by the cherries left behind.
This, I decide, is a more apt metaphor for my life.
***
The air feels like fall this morning. I sit on the front steps, looking out at the orchard, and notice the first hint of yellow on the leaves of the cherry tree. I close my eyes and feel the sun warm my face and imagine I’m sitting on a tree branch, legs dangling beneath me. There is less fruit on this branch than there used to be, but I’m not as hungry as I used to be, either. I could always shimmy down this branch and choose another if I so desired, but I like it here.
I was never meant to eat more than my fill anyway.
Cara Stolen lives on a cattle ranch in rural Washington state with her husband and three kids. After having the honor and privilege of writing alongside the Coffee + Crumbs team for the past six years, this is her final essay. She isn’t entirely sure what comes next, but it will almost certainly include running long distances, extended afternoons in her garden, and an early retirement from any and all social media. You might find her on Substack.