The Gifts I Almost Missed

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A couple years ago, a storm damaged some of our trees and we planted new ones. I used my phone to keep track of the names and locations. Since one of the trees on the list was a serviceberry, I think this is how I ended up with Amazon recommending a book called The Serviceberry. (affliliate) I assumed it was a book about caring for the tree. We’d only planted one, so I didn’t pay much attention and put it at the bottom of my reading list. Amazon kept recommending it.

I did what I often do with books. I took a peek. It was less about a commitment to read the book and more about figuring out why it kept showing up as a recommendation

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer is not a gardening guide. Kimmerer writes about gift economies, reciprocity, scarcity, capitalism, extraction, public policy, and Indigenous ways of knowing. She looks at the natural world and asks what it can teach us about wealth, community, and how we live together.

Kimmerer also taught me that serviceberries are edible. That was news to me. As I read, I could look out the window and see the tree, but I couldn’t remember it producing fruit. Beyond it, our beautiful orchard without a single piece of fruit. Despite taking good care of the trees, a weird frost took the entire orchard crop. No apples, peaches or pears.

It’s easy to come up with a negative verdict about the effort to care for the fruit trees, but it would be wrong. We can care for a tree, but we don’t control the fruit it produces. We don’t know what the harvest season will look like until we get through the seasons before it. The trees have to bloom. Those blossoms have to make it through the spring frost. Bees and other pollinators have to do their work. Then if enough goes right, tiny fruits begins to form and spend the summer growing toward harvest.

The fruit is a gift.

Kimmerer writes about the serviceberry as a teacher of reciprocity, shared abundance, and a way of understanding wealth through relationship instead of accumulation. She also asks us to consider what changes when we receive something as a gift instead of treating it as something we earned or were owed. It’s not a summary of everything she’s saying, but it’s what I thought about as I cut the grass around all the orchard trees later that day. I had been looking at the orchard as evidence of what we hadn’t received. The Serviceberry gave me another way to look at them.

The fruit loss in our orchard was real. There would be no apples to pick, share, cook, or eat. No peaches, pears, or serviceberries either.

I began to wonder if the trees weren’t giving us anything, or if the fruit was the only gift I had learned to receive. The trees are still growing. They were cleaning the air, cooling the ground, sheltering birds and insects, and giving their leaves to the soil as mulch and nourishment. Their roots held the earth in place and their branches were marking the seasons outside my window. None of that replaces fruit, but it does remind me that fruit is not their only gift.

Last week Omu thought she was making a pot of stew, and she discovered that her offering had created more than she could have guessed.

This week the trees are helping me notice that the expected result may not be the only gift being offered. I wonder how often I call a season scarce because the result I wanted was the only gift I could see.

For now, I’m trying to look again.

Leave a message an let me know how you’re looking at your own season again

See you next week. In the meantime, I’ll be cheering you on,

 

You can purchase The Serviceberry  with my Amazon affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases at no cost to you.