I am growing a pear tree for my daughter.

I ordered the sapling last spring, just a few weeks before her mother’s body opened up to let her out. Before I opened my fingers wide and held my hands as strong as I could to make sure I caught her. I was still worried, last spring, when I sat browsing the selection of fruit trees on the website, that something would be wrong with her, that she would be able to hear, and to see—that her tongue would be able to taste. The tests had all been clear, but it’s hard not to worry.

When she landed in my hands, tears welled up from the center of my chest. I cried and held her tighter and softer than I’ve ever held anyone before. I worried about dropping her and knew I wouldn’t. I looked at her face. Her skin was gray, turning pink. Her eyes were closed and she was covered in the slime of birth. I held her shoulders and her neck in one hand and the rest of her little body—outstretched arms and curled up legs—in the other. She breathed.

Eventually we counted fingers and toes and the doctors checked vision and hearing and told us that everything was okay. She was healthy.

She has a life ahead of her. She is four months old, and we haven’t even begun the long list of things we are going to do together. Right now we take walks around the park near the house. I hold her up to the trees and she reaches for maple and oak leaves. She grabs onto them. She nuzzles into my beard when she is tired. She laughs at a particular song when I sing it (She sells seashells by the seashore). She is happy and so am I. 

The sorrow she will feel terrifies me. She will be a woman in a patriarchal world. She is black enough (half) to be discriminated against. She will have to be careful where she parks her car at night. She will have to think before she walks around the city alone. She will have to watch her drink and make sure it is never left unattended. She will scroll on websites and see pictures of bodies that tell her that hers isn’t good enough. She will have her heart broken. She will feel alone. She will feel lost. She will struggle, like her father, with self-control and have to negotiate her relationship with every vice. She will cry. 

My daughter’s parents are not together. Her mother and I fight. During the pregnancy, threats were made. Court was invoked. You don’t deserve to see her. I know I have thought, several times, that Omi would be better off here with me and away from her mother’s anger and bitterness. Her mother, I know, has thought similar things about me.

My daughter’s life demands we try to figure things out. Time here. Time there.

*

The week after she was born, I planted the pear tree in my front yard. It was the beginning of May, a Saturday. Her mother and I wrapped Omira in a blanket and carried her outside. I poured half of her mother’s defrosted placenta from a bowl into the hole I’d dug for the tree. Then dirt, then tree, then dirt again, then a ring of mulch to keep the weeds away, then water. Layers of nutrients to grow. Circles of protection.

It was a puny thing—the tree—with one branch and only a few leaves. But it was, and is, Omi’s tree, and though it will take years, eventually it will bear fruit.

I have this image of my daughter coming back from college, pulling up outside of the house in a beat-up old car, grabbing a single bag overflowing with wrinkled clothes and worn paperbacks out of the passenger’s seat, and heading to the door. She stops before she gets to the door—she’s just passed by her tree. She stops, says hello to it, reaches up and grabs a pear, her pear. They are all her pears. She is happy to be home. I’m looking out the window as she gets out of the car. I see it all, and when she comes inside and we hug, her nose goes right to its spot beneath my beard.

Who knows if any of it will happen? The cost of college rises a ridiculous percent every year. More children are forced to live at home through their 20’s and 30’s. I’m only a school teacher and a writer. A White man with a Black daughter. Things are happening to trees. Forests, they say, are failing. The pear tree has been here for less than a year and already some of the leaves on her tree are already developing little black dots. The internet says it's some sort of fungal leaf spot. I don’t know what I’m doing. Besides, pears aren’t supposed to ripen until the beginning of September, so in my vision it would be more likely that she was grabbing one as she was leaving, not coming home.

Any halfway decent world leader will tell us, we face unprecedented challenges—the products of systemic over consumption and greed—an increasingly inhospitable planet, mistrust of others and alienation from ourselves. We are told over and over what is sure to go wrong by 2050. And yet, for some reason, in spite of this collective understanding that American society is devouring itself and that the world is falling apart, we keep living—planting trees and having children. Somehow, despite every logical reason to be pessimistic, human beings continue to have children, arguably the most optimistic action possible. 

It is probably because of my infant daughter that I walk around noticing all the babies in my neighborhood. We go to the park and all the parents peer into each other’s strollers asking, “Oh, how old is she?” We compare ages and I recognize that a year ago, each of us made the decision to bring a child into this world. 

And it is not only other parents, strangers too, dozens of them per day, stop to coo at the baby. They tell me how beautiful she is and how much they love babies and how her smile or her drooling sleep face has made their day. They walk by and they are happy. They are hopeful.

Does it make sense to be hopeful in this moment? Is a sense of hope even helpful? Maybe pessimism would force us into the action we need.

As a teacher at an alternative high school, I work daily with students who are falling behind academically. I advocate for honest conversations with students. We can’t lie to them, I say in staff meetings. We have to give them accurate information, it doesn’t matter how harsh. If they are eighteen with a fourth-grade reading level, on track to finish high school when they are twenty-two, they need to know. It is our responsibility to be truthful no matter how dire the circumstances.

The earth is truthful. Rivers do not pretend to be healthier than they are. Nor do oceans or underground aquifers. Her pear tree isn’t going to bear fruit if it isn’t healthy.

Nature is brutally honest.

And yet, nature is also hopeful. I have no systematic evidence of this reality, but I have a daughter who makes me sure of it, and I work with young people who make me sure of it. The mere fact that if you choose a place that gets adequate sun, plant a tree, let it grow without competition from other plants and make sure that it is has enough water, this could one day lead to baskets of pears, apples, peaches or oranges should be evidence enough that the world we live in is full of hope.

I remember once during a summer in New York City, surrounded by trapped heat and blistering concrete, sweating from morning through night I found myself at the edge of the Union Square Farmers Market. New York shows us the best and worst of humanity. That day, the worst was getting to me: teenagers buying their 50th pair of collector’s edition sneakers while the guy right outside stands barefoot on a square of cardboard; new arrivals to the city asking for a few dollars to feed their families ignored by couples willing to spend 30 bucks for a pair of bagels and two tall lattes; trees confined to 2 foot by 3 foot squares in the concrete. All of us, at this point, are guilty of colluding with a system that is bent on destroying our planet and leaving our children with a barren cityscape.

I walked through the market feeling all of this; unimpressed by the exorbitant prices of Downtown Manhattan; skeptical of the vegan handbags for sale at one of the stands; unconvinced by the signs outside some of the stalls for sustainable meat. Fuck, I thought, and wanted to go home to Boston, a smaller city, a more manageable crisis. When you get back home there will be no need to eat out. At least you can buy less.

But I was hungry.

So I picked out a peach. I hadn’t had a good peach in a while, and there lay a pile of them, fat and round, the fuzz on the outside muting the orange. The one I chose still had a little bit of its green stem on it. It fit in my hand, heavy in my palm. I paid something ridiculous, four or five dollars maybe, for this single piece of fruit.

When I bit it I had to suck the juice out of the flesh to keep it from running. It soaked my fingers, and I didn’t care. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk and devoured it while the world passed by and everything, somehow, felt ok. Eating a ripe piece of fruit may be one of the only forms of ethical consumption.

* 

I spend most of my time at the grocery store in the produce section, tasting all the grapes, opening cartons of berries to make sure they are ripe and tapping on melons. I have learned tricks over the years. There are obvious ones, like the thwack you are supposed to get when you drop your index finger on the watermelon. But there are others. Recently, I’ve taken to smelling the bottom of the pineapples. They are ready when, even though they are green, they smell golden. Stone fruits are never going to be perfect in the store. I pick the ones that look good and take them home where they sit on my counter for a few days until they are ready. During apple season in New England, I buy bags full of different varieties and slice them into little wedges. All of them are sweet, crisp and decidedly fresh.

I have learned to ask whoever is working in the produce section what is fresh. I have yet to be steered wrong. They touch the fruit, putting it out all morning; they know if this is a good batch of mangos, or if the nectarines are ripe.

I make friends too, older people mostly, who are in no rush, take their fruit seriously and have decades of experience. I carry my four-month-old daughter in one arm and cradle pieces of fruit in the other. The old folks get time to interact with a baby. I get tips and tricks that I can give her when she is older. The darker yellow the spot on the watermelon, the more time it's spent sitting on the vine getting sweet.

The supermarket produce section is nowhere near the farm. To produce the quantities necessary, and at the prices we expect, massive farms are pumping the land with chemical fertilizers. We cannot forget the need for workers’ rights and protections for the people who grow and pick the fruit that we have come to expect. We don’t always eat in season.

We know, here in New England, that the winters will be harsh. My daughter will grow up knowing this—that dark and cold and scarcity are parts of life on earth. As is dismay. As is pessimism. These things build during the gloom of the January and February; when there is no color in the world; when we stretch out time in bed as long as we possibly can to avoid the cold; when there is nothing fresh to eat.

But spring and summer come, and with them not just the warmth of the sun.

How can one argue against the sweetness of a ripe piece of fruit? Don’t we all giggle, just a little, at the juice that runs down from the corners of our mouths?            

Autumn is around the corner now, in the year 2022, and I am settling in, eating what I can before the world feels barren. The raspberries and blackberries I so enjoy are already gone. My daughter will get her first teeth and begin eating in the winter. I’m excited about her first taste of solid food. What fruit will it be? 

I can’t help but feel hopeful.

I know when our pears grow, even if it is just a few of them, even if squirrels eat most of the young ones before they are ripe, as I’ve been told is likely, my daughter and I will pull off what’s left and give them to our neighbors. I know that people passing by will pause when they see the tree.