I love pears. The taste, the shape and color, but the trees most of all. I’m not sure there was ever a deciding moment but I have always felt myself reach for them at the farmers market, marvel at a new color variety at the grocery store and drawn toward the still-life water color paintings of them.
My mother-in-law was telling a story of a long past relative with the surname Perry. I was pregnant at the time and it hit me that Perry should be her name. I went home and googled the meaning and it said, “One who dwells by the pear tree.” Our little pear tree dweller was born Christmas Eve of that year with vintage prints of pears on her nursery walls.
I’d heard a story about an old man planting trees that he’d never see grow for the people that would come after him and it has always stuck with me. So with a mix of my pear love and that story I had the urge to mark every house we owned with a pear tree. In Houston there just didn’t seem to be the right spot. In Midland house #1 there was no grass and no water but two doors down was a master gardener with a gigantic pear tree. My kids ended up naming him Mr. Pears, and he brought us pear butter each October. Midland house #2 seemed to be the perfect start to my made-up tradition but time moved faster than I had planned and a year had gone by with no tree planted. Then we decided we would be moving the next year and so we soaked up every minute with our people and traveled back and forth between our Dripping and Midland home often. “Should I plant one before we leave?” I’d waited too long. Lucky for me (and the would be tree) that I never got around to it because it was a mean hot summer with no rain and it surely would have died.
The move was made during that mean hot summer with 80 days in a row over 100 degrees. I was by myself with the kids most of the week, Rob still working in Midland on weekdays. And as change tends to do, it started to unsettle and unsteady me. I began to doubt our choice to move, the choice to change practically everything we’d worked toward for the last twelve years. I doubted the vision of the home we’d bought. It was too much work, too big a mess, too many creatures, and too close to the highway. My only choice was to remember how God had already moved, how He had called us, and how He had started the series of events we could trace years before. I prayed hard, unceasingly, out loud and in silence, in tears and in the car, “Show me this is what you wanted for us. Show me this house is not a mistake, show us your goodness in this place”
We have a couple acres, much of it wooded and unkept for at least the last ten years. One weekend about a month after we moved Rob came home and Perry asked if we could have a family adventure. So one bright hot Sunday morning we tucked our shirts into our pants and pants into our boots and headed out into the trees. We saw fox dens and twenty year old vines swooping through the massive oaks, old paint cans and things to add to our eternal list of to-dos. We had made it to the edge of the property when my lover-of-the-earth-Perry said,
We have a couple acres, much of it wooded and unkept for at least the last ten years. One weekend about a month after we moved Rob came home and Perry asked if we could have a family adventure. So one bright hot Sunday morning we tucked our shirts into our pants and pants into our boots and headed out into the trees. We saw fox dens and twenty year old vines swooping through the massive oaks, old paint cans and things to add to our eternal list of to-dos. We had made it to the edge of the property when my lover-of-the-earth-Perry said,
“What’s that?” It was a tiny tree, with tiny fruit on it.
I kept looking and just beyond this tree were two more like it...
that were not so sickly …
and FULL of pears.
I cried then and I cry when I tell this story because God's goodness is real, and tangible and timely. To answer my prayers for confirmation of this home and move, He started my tradition of marking our home and future with the three pear trees I’d wished I planted.
