More lessons from nature

Spring has arrived here in the Southeast, issuing, as it does each year, a gentle reminder that everything is exactly as it is meant to be happening, in the exact time it is meant to be happening.

Which, I might add, is often, not my timing.

While the saucer Magnolias and Cherries, and Bradford Pears are flowering, some of the Oaks, some Beeches and Maples, are still holding onto their leaves.

Holding onto these leaves is a phenomenon called Marcescence.

There is apparently no formal, agreed-upon theory for why this happens.

I am an ISA Certified Arborist, and I just shrug and say, Eh, some trees just do that.

Why are they doing that, clients often want to know, for whatever it is their trees are doing. I often go to a client’s house with a beautifully wooded backyard and an enormous tree growing directly over their roof, it’s limbs reaching, reaching, reaching.

There’s a lot of science behind it, I say, you can get a PhD in this, of course, I say.

But, it’s usually embarrassingly simple.

They like light. They like water. Not too much, not too little.

To have space to reach and grow and spread their limbs.

They like nutrient-rich, fertile soil. They don’t like poison (round-up or the like) in their water supply, or anywhere near where they’re roots are, which extends well out to the drip line, generally the edge of where the limbs reach.

They choose to send energy where they will get their best return. The low dead is where the tree has made a decision — this limb no longer serves me. I don’t want to send any more energy down here.

And so the tree grows — reaches, and bends, and twists — chooses to expend its energy wisely, observes quietly where it will get its best return, and then ever so slowly starts moving that way.

My favorite boundaries expert, Molly Davis (who I cite often), says the question to ask is, Is this conducive to life?

And I suppose that is what the trees are saying. Maybe these trees just haven’t fully made the decision to sever these no-longer-useful parts.

The leaves, having lost their chlorophyll when they withered to brown, are no longer providing nutrients to tree. And yet, the tree holds on for a while longer.

Why?

It just happens that way, it would appear the science community has shrugged. Surely a survival adaptation, the theory goes.

Why do we hang onto things for “too long?'“ Because it isn’t time.

How do we know it’s happening as it’s meant to be happening, I want to know.

The evidence is simple: it is happening.

We have moved our baby out of our room recently. We peeled the decal of baby jungle animals off our bedroom wall.

But I couldn’t bring myself to peel the very last decal. It is a lemur, holding onto a banana.

“You little thief,” my mom said to the lemur decal, while she and I put up the art.

I held my baby so many times in front of that decal, changed my baby on her changing pad, whispered, as I do, I am so lucky I get to be your mom.

She is our last baby. Officially, for sure, 1000%, our last baby. And so this is the last baby I will ever move out of my room.

I miss her in my room, and I don’t miss her in our room (this may be more of these examples of how I am in insufferable).

I will peel the decal soon enough, surely, and our room will no longer hold any evidence that we had our nursery in here, but until then, I’ll keep looking at that lemur, and saying, You little thief.

She turned two last week.

This is the time of year, most practically, I say, that whatever jacket I put my kids in, it’s the wrong one. Last week, it was a low of 37 on Tuesday, and a high of 89 on Wednesday.

My husband is better at following the weather patterns, and he does a better job of putting them in the jackets they are meant to be in.

Perhaps the most important thing about nature’s timing is this: it doesn’t have to make sense to me.