Blooming

A few years ago, I visited my home town. We drove by the house of my childhood and while I was anxious to take it all in, my eyes were mostly hungry for one thing. Is my mimosa tree still there?

Sadly, it is not. Nor is the fence that separated our yard space from the garden area. The barbed wire fence scraped my leg when our Shetland pony tried to get me off of him by running along the fence. The only thing I liked about that mean horse was it threw, bit and kicked my brother in a short 5-second rodeo. It was like a little bit of justice was done for the big-brother stuff he could dish out!

The garden was gone. All that work of cultivating, harvesting, weeding... gone. Now a grassy area is there and no one could look at it now and know that it once produced food for our family.

I met God in that garden. I could pray and pull weeds and sing as loudly as I wanted. I made up songs to God that no one else heard. God produced soul food for me there. And like any land or soul left unattended, random wild growth is there where order and fruitfulness once lived.

The shed that was behind our house; also gone. As a child, I was afraid to go into that shed. It was dark, old and rickety. It is where we stored the feed for the pigs, sheep, chickens and dogs. I had to go in there to get the feed for animals.

But I don't miss the garden so much--and certainly not the shed!

I miss the mimosa tree.

It was pretty. Delicate. Blooming.

The branches were easy to climb and bent slightly when I rested in them.

I pretended the blooms were powder puffs.

I felt feminine there. It was luxurious.

I read so many books in that tree. I read the entire biographical section of our school library.

People say a mimosa tree is like the weed of trees.

I thought I was like a weed, too. 

A little weed girl in a little weed tree.

Blooming.