Ready for spring
I know we’ve all become a bit cranky over the recent influx of cold and snowy weather. There has been too much for those of us who desperately await spring’s arrival, and too little for even the most die-hard winter fans to use for skiing, snowboarding or whatever else winter people like to do.
But, I realized this weekend that there was an upside – albeit a very small one – to the lingering winter: I had yet to prune my fruit trees. Of course, they had slightly begun to leaf out when everything was warm and sunny there a few weeks ago. (To be air, however, they had begun to leaf out that week in December when it was nearly 80 degrees as well.) But this latest bout of winter cold had stopped the growth of the leaves, and it is my hope, the flow of the sap at the same time.
Saturday dawned cold and frosty, so I grabbed my pruners and headed out the door. I approached the first tree and began to talk to it. If it could hear me, I felt the need to tell it that I had absolutely no skill at pruning and was simply trying to replicate what I had seen on the Internet.
A slight breeze picked up as the tree leaned away from me.
I began snipping, chopping and pruning off branches. Dead ones were easy to decide upon. So were the ones that were growing directly into other branches. After that, it became more difficult, so I fixed a picture into my mind of what I hoped the tree would look like when I was done and worked the branches into that shape. I never was very good at drawing.
About halfway through, that breeze became a gale and it began snowing. I had to stand on my toes to reach the taller branches, and I slipped on the frozen grass and fell, jarring my head off of my shoulder.
Undeterred, I tried again. I tried looking up at the taller branches, but the snow was really coming down and I had to close my eyes against its onslaught. Yes, I was pruning my tree with my eyes closed, though I’m not sure that it made a difference.
I finally had to give up on the last branch. I just couldn’t reach it at the height that it needed to be trimmed. I moved on to the next tree and began again. It was slightly smaller, so it took less time. Either that or I had given up my grand delusions that I could figure out how to do it properly and instead figured out how to do it quickly.
I moved on to the third, then the fourth tree. Five, six and seven took very little time at all. Only the first two had branches too tall for me to reach, but I left them wearing Mohawk haircuts.
As done as I could be, I returned to the house. A layer of icy snow clung to my jacket and my face was numb. As I began trying to unzip my jacket with frozen fingers, my son came to the kitchen wrapped in a blanket.
“Where were you?” he asked. “It’s a blizzard out there!”
Just trying to finish the winter chores so spring can truly arrive.