Pomegranate Tease

Budding Branches Warm a Winter

©2014 Shelley S. Cramm

on February 25, 2014

Leafed out! What are you doing, little pomegranate tree?! I brought you inside to shelter you from the polar vortex gusting into your new garden home—but you’ve mistaken what I consider to be a drafty, north-faced living room for a cool spring invitation to burst with life. O dear! Now added to my seemingly eternal list of action items is hauling you back outside on warmish days, returning you inside for these arctic-infused nights. Back and forth, back and forth in an over and over again insanity: Who does this? What we crazy land-forming-and-filling people won’t do for the hope and delight of growing our own, a joy too hard to contain rationally in the face of turncoat weather. Overflowing displays of the brilliant red fruits in the supermarkets this winter captivated me; that Punica granatum is hardy in my area and drought tolerant were facts that like a wheelbarrow hauled me to the nursery in happy haste.

So here I am, caution blown back at me by the northern wind as I move this plant back and forth, in and out. Why don’t you leave it in the garage? my husband wonders matter-of-factly. For all my grumbling, I love to see the budding branches, to live with this evidence of God’s forever blessing right here in our house.

“‘From this day on I will bless you.’” Haggai 2:19 NIV

The Song of Songs lover went down to the grove to see if the pomegranate trees were in bloom (Song of Songs 6:11); for now, I need only go to the living room.