Friendship in Season

I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass when her essay "The Council of Pecans" inspired a thought that the various species of trees, each flowering in their own season and timeline providing nutrient fruits when necessary are like the friendships that flower in our lives. As Wall Kimmerer explains, Pecan trees are masting-fruit trees - spending years making sugar and storing it, banking up calories in their roots. When the grove has accumulated enough stores, they overflow with pecan fruits. Tree physiologists and evolutionary biologists are stumped by the boom-and-bust cycle of masting-fruit trees, hypothesizing that once the trees make enough stores to produce fruit, then they do, but trees grow and accumulate calories at different rates in different habitats. If this were true, each tree would produce fruit on its own cycle, but the whole grove–every pecan grove across the country and state flourishes. 

We wonder why certain friendships flower during different stages in our lives. Perhaps sweet nectar-like friendships that flower in the summer of our lives and last only through those short summer months. Perhaps like bitter berries budding in the springtime of our lives. Perhaps like the meaty pecan tree dropping its fruits during the fall and winter of our lives. Perhaps even remaining evergreen through every season. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the lifecycle of these friendship-trees. Some which are so sweet last so short and once the fruits have turned overripe, they leave a bitter, fermented taste in our mouths and in our hearts. Other friendship-trees remain constant through the seasons with their content reliability providing shelter like the evergreen or providing sustenance just when we need it most, like the pecan tree.  

Friendships that have reached their maturity are like ripened fruits falling from the tree when their season has come. The fruits that ripened were a gift-fruit to us to cherish but not to hold onto though another harvest may not return to the tree or it may go dormant in our lifetime. We enjoy the fruit in its season and once they have begun to over-ripen, turn bruised and mush we must learn to leave the overripened harvest because it no longer nourishes our life. We may miss the flavor of the friendship in our hearts–craving the taste that it once had but no longer offers. 

Friendship tastes sweet in its season, showing the beauty of ripened fruit, the flowers budding and bursting, the colors and flavors bringing us joy, but once the fruit turns, the leaves begin to wilt, and we mourn the beauty that once was. Some friendships will blossom again in another season, some trees remain evergreen but others flower only once in our lifetime. Though we may miss the taste of particular friendships, the ghost of their flavor on our mouths and memory, we must accept that some trees are only meant to blossom once. Those are the most memorable friendships, not because they are the best, but because as time passes we want what we had, we try to recall what that friendship tasted like and certain flavors come to mind but as time passes we see the clarity of those friendships, mourning the beauty but seeing the reality for what it was: a temporary satiation, neither providing sustenance nor security.