The Avocado Tree That Could

Baby avocado tree

The week after my newly minted fiancé and I got home, we did two major renovations. We updated our deck and patio with new decking and plants and then we brought home two playful bernadoodles.

Newly engaged, new patio, new dogs...the world was beautiful!

And one week after that, one of those precious bernadoodles ate our baby avocado tree and $600 later we were assured she was not poisoned.

And though all that was left of the avocado tree was a twig, I was not going to give up on it.

Dave turned to me one day and said "we should really throw that out" and I said "just let me water it, let me try."

I wasn't willing to give up. I don't give up easily. I stick out a lot of the hard stuff to either, accomplish something bigger than myself or to say to myself "I tried and I didn't give up."

That's what it felt like over the last 5 years with my book, Break at the Bend. There were times I didn't want to look at it anymore. I didn't want to relive moments of my life that were hard or embarrassing. There were times I didn't want to put something out there that my number one fan would never, herself, read.

But quarter by quarter, I would do something with it. I would water it. Change this, remove that, find humor or beauty or healing in the other.

Red Sky at Morn

As I was walking those two bernadoodles this morning and looking out at the sky that was radiantly colored in reds and pinks and oranges, I thought, today is the day my book gets released into the world.

Today friends, foes, strangers and acquaintances will read the stories that gutted me and the ones I joyfully regaled too. Today my book leaves my hands and goes into the hands of others.

The colors of the sky show she's watching over me. Every single time I see those colors, I think of the most vivid memory as a child in the backseat of her car and my mother saying to me as I looked in awe at the iridescent sky, with her thick West Virginia/Southeast Texan twang "Red sky a night, sailors delight. Red sky at morn, sailors at warn."

Not once did she sail, nor spend much time on any kind of boat. But my mom loved a poem and the beauty I see and saw in nature, she saw in words. So I wasn't at warn this morning with the red sky, because I'm not a sailor, but I was comforted by the beauty of her words still echoing in my heart.

As I saw beauty in the sky, and the life in the twig, I know she saw the beauty in any and every written word.

May the water I poured into my book, Break At The Bend, be as nourishing and flourishing as the water I put into that twig...that eventually turned into this tree.

Mature Avocado Tree