Five Minute Friday: So, there's this TREE

Today’s Five Minute Friday word is TREE. Play along. Write for five minutes and then link up on the Clitheroe original post from Lisa Jo Baker.

GO

So, there’s this tree in my front yard. It has been there for about a decade. Actually, a little over 11 years. It got there when I planted it with my first husband.

You see, the tree was a gift for our wedding. It symbolized growth and endurance — what every newly married couple hopes for.

Sadly, about three years after planting that tree, the marriage crumbled.

And now, I have this tree in the front yard that Aaron, my forever husband, takes care of. He plants pretty things around it. He’s even taken the time to put garden bricks around it. He knows where it came from, yet he takes care of the tree as if it was his own.

The tree may have, at one time, symbolized the hopeful strength of a new marriage. There have been times when I’ve thought about digging it out or chopping it down. There are even times when I sit on the front porch and stare at it thinking of what sadness it came to symbolize even as a relatively young sapling grappling its way through the ground and trying to set up its roots.

These days, I try to see it as something else, though. Through the demise of my first marriage, I learned more about myself than I ever did as a teenager or as a reflective mother of three. I learned in those years that I battled and fought for a marriage that wasn’t going to take — that wasn’t going to set up permanent roots — that I was as strong as this little sapling.

I could endure the pain — the wind, the frost, the beating sun. I could endure, and I could prevail.

And I did. I came out of the other side of that divorce with a few nicks and a few scrapes in my bark. But I came out stronger than when I first went in.

STOP

Tags: divorce, fiveminutefriday, tree