Fruition

It’s almost Thanksgiving, the patio furniture is put away, and the grass is trimmed short. And we finally have collected all the apples under the trees in our yard.

It was a banner blossom year. The perfect mix of rain, and sun, and some years of pruning led to a plethora of apples.

Our property must have been an orchard at one time, because there is an unusual number of apple trees at the edge of the woods circling our house. Most were not cared for over many years, so they have grown too tall to prune. Giant even.

These trees create thousands of tiny apples instead of hundreds of normally sized ones. Too small to bake into pies, many too imperfect to bother eating.

Some years, there are more apples than even the deer and porcupines can eat. And if we don’t do anything about them, these bushels turn into applesauce on the lawn. So, we have to gather them up and create piles in the woods and the deer will find them come winter.

As we gather the apples into empty asphalt buckets and garbage cans, they make satisfying plunks as you drop them in, one after the other. Yellow jackets spend a few weeks on these piles, drunk on the juice. It’s a battle against nature, because every day we clear out under one tree and then next day, another 50 or 100 have fallen.

It always makes me a little sad seeing all these tiny apples as we dump bucket after bucket in the woods.

Each apple was the thread of a possibility. An apple-kernel of an idea. Something birthed but that didn't get far. Any one of them might have grown into something powerful—an apple worth eating, worth giving away, worth peeling for crisp or baking into a pie—but instead they live a short life and fall bruised to the ground.

Isn’t this the way it is with our thoughts?

Researchers say the average human has 6,200 thoughts each day.

A thought such as: It’s cold out today. Or, I want to write a book by the time I’m thirty! Or, I really screwed up; I am worthless! Or, I don’t like wool sweaters. Or, I wish my mother would live forever.

Sometimes, one of those thoughts is an idea that actually comes to fruition.

(Ha! Fruition!)

But instead, sometimes the ideas thump, thump, thump; fall to the ground.

It's just like that; we have to let one thought after another go.

And then there are some that turn into a thought worm (yes, that's really what they call it), transitioning to another thought, and another—and some of those might live.

I often reflect on how life is so abruptly short—not enough time to see enough of these thoughts and ideas live on. It’s painful, really. I learned this week that a good friend of mine passed away suddenly at 62. She ran out of time to nurture her orchard and what was in it.

We all have more ideas of what we could do than time we have to manifest them.

Susan B. Anthony said, “Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.”

Yet, we must press on. There is so much yet to be done. We must pick up and study apple after apple, one by one, to find the gems worth keeping.