Snip!

Last year we sold our Geo Prizm to a girl (I think 16 years old) who was an ice skater. I don't remember where she lived but she said it was in a different town. Today we were driving through our neighborhood, passing a neighbor's home and we saw the Prizm parked out in front. It figures--our neighbor is an ice skater too, so they have common cause. Okay, now on to the pawpaws.

You'll remember, I'm positive, the pawpaw called C3 aka Curly Q, which was one of the first to sprout but then got it's head stuck in the mud and stayed like that for weeks, so that the sprout cornified and hardened. And even when I helped C3 get its head out of the mud, its stalk stayed curled.

It was growing in such a pleasing swoosh that I thought I would just keep it that way, and then hopefully have a little pawpaw tree that would offer something unique, aesthetically speaking.

But the other day I touched C3, and one of its leaves fell right off. You can see the leaf in the soil below the curled stalk. And I realized it was failing to thrive. I also realized I might not be able to coax it into becoming the pawpaw bonsai tree of my dreams. So, what to do? What might optimize its chances of becoming a tree or at least some rootstock for a grafted pawpaw?

Oh my, look at that--a swoosh to make Nike jealous.

So I decided that if I cut the little trunk, there might still be energy in the root and time enough in the growing season for it to put forth some new leaves and get some growing done before winter.

After I made the snip, I regretted what I had done. How could I have cut such a curly tree? Before I cut it, I'd say it had a 25% chance of becoming the bonsai pawpaw tree of my dreams.

But after I cut it, the chances plummeted to nearly zero.

Hope.

I laid the curly tree to rest among other noble pieces of plant-matter: 1) a club of wood gnawed clean by a beaver; 2) a splintering piece of desert juniper with a bulbous growth that in life was a plant's plague but in death was a human's trophy; 3) a chunk of wood that was burned by a fire long ago but was then tumbled around among rocks until the black charred parts were worn away, leaving only the most lucky or fire-resistant portions; and 4) the root of a pawpaw tree that wasn't awakening early enough in the spring and was staying up too late in the winter, now reminding me of the mandrake root in John Donne's poem "Go and Catch a Falling Star." Upon this heap of worthy peers, I laid to rest C3's tenacious curl.