Downstairs the Queen is Knitting by Dorcas Smucker

Author:Dorcas Smucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pruning’s Purpose

N o one has ever taught me to properly prune the grapevines south of the house, so I always cut enthusiastically and hope for the best, which has never seemed to bother the vines. Each year they send 15-foot tendrils all over the arbor and even far up into the nearby pine trees, and then produce a solid crop of grapes.

This year’s pruning began on a rare pleasant day in February, inspired less by the grapevine’s needs than by the emerging flock of daffodils on the ground below — I wanted to enjoy their yellow beauty without the interference of a tangle of drooping vines. When I finished, the discarded vines lay on the grass and the arbor and daffodils made a neat, uncluttered picture in the yard.

Cleaning out the oak grove was a much bigger project.

My brother-in-law, Kenneth, owns the fescue field north of our house and also the band of oak trees just across the road. Until recently, the trees stood knee-deep in a tangled undergrowth of blackberries and saplings and unnamed bushes. Then Kenneth and a few friends moved in with a chainsaw and heavy equipment. I watched, worried that the entire site was being turned into more fescue field. But when all the branches and brambles were cleared away, the oak trees remained, clean and clearly outlined, from exposed roots on the ground to long crooked branches against the sky.

These pruning endeavors were soon followed, coincidentally, by a Sunday school lesson from the Gospel of John that likens Jesus to the main grapevine and we followers to the branches. God is the gardener who prunes the vines to make them more fruitful, the verses say, implying that God is not an indiscriminate whacker like me but knows exactly where to cut, and when. Such trimming also implies suffering, that worrisome experience we all try to avoid, from inconvenience and irritations to debilitating pain and loss.

Trusting that there is a gardener and that he knows what he is doing is a fine theory, easily assented to in a theoretical Sunday school discussion, or when the cuts are not too painful and it seems they might actually be for some purpose. I think, for example, of our 18-year-old daughter, Amy, who recently returned home after six weeks away and found that she is now shorter than all but one of her five siblings. She has no hope of ever being taller, which is not a huge handicap, to be sure, and yet she has had to accept that people will never take her seriously at first glance and she will never be able to reach top cupboards unassisted by stepstools.

Yet it is not too hard to believe that there may be something redemptive in this. “Aunt Amy” will no doubt be known to all her nieces and nephews as the first adult they equal in height when they hit their growth spurt. Perhaps she will be able to influence them at eye level in a way that larger adults cannot.

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