By Edward H. Garcia
My wife and I have been clearing parts of our property in Callender Lake. We live off the lake and have several acre lots around us—lots of privacy and lots of brush. Every winter we like to get out and push back against Nature and expand what we like to call our “estate”—though it’s hard to call it that with a straight face. If you don’t know about it, Callender Lake is a nice community around a pretty lake. The nearest big town is Edom—though the Internet, in its wisdom, thinks we’re close to Opeleika—it keeps telling me about job openings in Opeleika and beautiful singles and ladies who have lost a lot of weight in Opeleika. Recently, I got an email asking: “You still around Opeleika, Ed?” The Internet doesn’t lie, so maybe I am and don’t know it.
Callender Lake has one street named Elm, one with Pine in the name, two with Oak in their names, one Dogwood, and four different streets with briar in them: Briar Grove, Briar Valley, Briar Hill, and Briar Glen. That’s a clue. In addition to beautiful hardwoods and pines, we have a lot of thorny vines on our property. In fact, there seems to be an ongoing war between vines and trees, and the vines often win. I’m sure I am speaking loosely when I call the rich variety of prickly, entwining things on our property “vines.” I hope someday to make a study of them and be able to distinguish among them, but for now, at my present state of knowledge, they are vines and I am at war with them.
The vines are so abundant and so fast growing that they can easily overwhelm a small tree and even infest and kill a large oak. I confess I am on the side of all trees, even the lowly sassafras, and measure my success by the number of trees I have “freed” or “saved.” I hear an almost religious flavor in what I’ve just written, and I must admit it does have that about it. Vine hunting is conducive to deep meditative thoughts. One year I found myself thinking of what the vines must think of me—here I was intending to do a good deed, but maybe to the vines I was a scourge, a boogie man vine parents used to scare vine children into behaving. Well, maybe not deep thoughts, but thoughts nonetheless.
This year I’ve been thinking (as I strain against thirty feet of green, prickly vine) about the lessons vines and our dealings with them can teach us about relationships. One lesson that comes to mind is that there is no such thing as benign neglect. Leave vines alone for a year or two, and you will come back to find they’ve traveled fifty feet or more up a tree and are beginning to choke the life out of it. I find the same thing is true with problems in relationships—they don’t get better unless you do something about them. And if you wait too long to deal with them, it might be too late.
In both cases, doing something about them is not necessarily simple. When a tree is truly infested, with three or four kinds of vines clinging all the way up to its tallest branches and with vine “trunks” two to three inches in diameter, you might be tempted to give up and cut the whole thing down. We’ve probably all given up on a relationship or two in our times. But saving the tree or the relationship takes patience. The first step is to stop the growth by cutting off the vines at ground level. Remove whatever is nurturing the problem, so that it doesn’t keep getting worse, and then take the time to pull out the vines you can. Maybe the problem won’t be solved this year, but eventually the dead vines will fall out on their own, lacking whatever nurtured them in the first place. In a relationship problems sometimes have a way of solving themselves, if you don’t keep feeding them.
If the vines are small enough or less well established, you can pull them down and out of the tree, but my experience is that in most cases, doing it all down at once is impossible. On the other hand, pulling down each strand of vine separately can work. The same thing is true of knotty problem in relationships—solving them all at once can feel overwhelming, but taking them one at a time, it is possible to deal with them, solve or neutralize them, and then go on to the next one. Before long, the rest will cascade down, and the relationship will have a chance to flourish.
Just because you’ve freed a tree doesn’t mean it will stay free. You have to pay attention to the vines’ inevitable attempts to re-infest. The same thing is true of a relationship we’ve grown complacent about. Relationships are never safe from backsliding and neglect. They have to be nurtured and kept safe from an encroaching world.
One last lesson about vines and relationships comes to mind. When you’re busy working on the tree, enthusiastically pulling down those treacherous vines, it’s a good idea to keep your eyes and ears open because sometimes you’ll find yourself pulling down a sizable dead limb on yourself, with dire results. The wife who confronts her husband about neglect and is told that he wants a divorce might regret having pulled on that particular vine. But my experience with vines and trees tells me that it was just a matter of time before the whole tree would have come down anyway.
