Bittersweet

 

The full soul

loatheth an honeycomb;

but to the hungry soul

every bitter thing is sweet.

 

 -- Proverbs 27:7

 

Ours may be the only home in your circle of acquaintance with a whole bunch of dead, creepy branches coiled up in the bathtub, soaking. No, I'm not getting in there with them and taking some kind of weird new environmental bath. That "woodn't" be very glamorous.

 

No, they're grapevines from our backyard. We have an area under huge pine trees that is supposed to be a shady garden wonderland. But I let it go this summer. It became a thicket of unwanted vines, volunteer trees, weeds and my old nemesis, poison ivy. Two afternoons last week, I "manned up" and went out there and collected five garbage cans, five yard-waste sacks, and a pickup truckload of the bad stuff. Boy, does it look better.

 

How did the grapevines get in our yard? Our neighbors had purchased some fancy European grape plants some years ago. They cultivate them on some makeshift "T's" and have their own mini-winery. It's cool! Well, the birds occasionally feast on their grapes. Then nature happens as they fly over our backyard. And we had grapevines aplenty.

 

 

 

Even though it was a pain to pull the stiff vines off the trees and out from under the soft layer of needles, I now have about a mile of the stuff. You know grapevines: the ones with the funny little springs sticking out? All kinds of character. I'm so excited. I'm soaking them so they'll be pliable. As soon as I get a chance (this week? this year?) I'm going to try to make wreaths and garlands out of them to give as presents.

 

What I thought was going to be a chore - weeding - turned into a fun adventure. Now I'll have something tangible to show for my bad back and aching arms.

 

There's more: I picked up a ton of pretty pine cones that would make great winter decorations, but they were sticky. The answer: you bake them in the oven for a couple of hours at a low temperature to kill off the bugs and get the sticky resin to ooze off.

 

The good news was, our house smelled fabulous. The BAD news was, I didn't think to put foil in the pan. It got dotted with countless hard blobs of resin and took a lot of work to clean off. But I love my new pinecone arsenal and am looking forward to doing fun things with them.

 

Still another benefit: I didn't even know our neighbor had a black walnut tree back there until I started spotting all these half-gnawed walnut shells, and plenty of the hard, green, mini tennis balls that are the unshelled nuts. Now we have a half-bucket full, and my mouth is watering over all those great holiday desserts I can make.

 

I could've paid some burly man to do all this for me. But then I wouldn't have had an adventure! I could have bought grapevine wreaths, pine cones and black walnuts at the store, very inexpensively. But they wouldn't be a tenth of the blessing they are, since I foraged for them myself, on a gorgeous Indian summer day in my own back yard. The hard work was well worth it.

 

But then the phone rang, and it was my mother. She is doing great, but she has battled lung cancer and now brain cancer in recent years.

 

She remembers giving away boxes of holiday decorations last year, when she didn't think she was going to make it. Thankfully, she was wrong. Now she needed her Halloween stuff back for Bridge Club, which she is hosting next week. She thought she had given it all to me. Since it is Indian summer, could she be an Indian giver and get it back?

 

"But Mom, I don't have it," I protested. I had just been rooting around in our holiday closet, and hadn't seen the ceramic jack o'lanterns and other decorations she described. Could she have given it to the Goodwill? She didn't think so, but she sure didn't want to have to go get all new stuff.

 

She said with a sigh, "Maybe I can just go out and buy some bittersweet and use that for my table."

 

But I had been out and about, and hadn't seen any bittersweet in any of the garden stores. We had just been to Nebraska City, the apple orchard capital of our state with all kinds of autumn decorations for sale, and I hadn't seen any bittersweet there, either.

 

I hung up, and teared up.

 

Poor Mom. I don't want her to have any disappointments or frustrations. But I can't help her. All these months as she has battled cancer, I've felt helpless. I'm not a surgeon, not a radiologist, not a nurse. And now, in a really easy area where I should be able to help - cutesy home decorating -- I'm a bust, too.

 

Immediately, the phone rang again.

 

This time, it was the neighbor - the one with the black walnut tree. She has a spectacular yard with all kinds of plants and is getting ready to re-landscape.

 

"We're replacing the fence around the swimming pool," she said, "and we're going to have to take out our big, old bittersweet plant. Would you like to come over and take as much as you want?"

 

WHAAAAAAAAT?!?

 

Would I?

 

For 10 years we've lived here, and I've seen that big bush cascading over her fence. For 10 years, I had no idea what it was. The berries are kind of hidden underneath the foliage.

 

I told her what Mom had just said about bittersweet, and since this neighbor had gone to school with my mom decades ago, it was fun for her to be able to bless her so specially.

 

Wiping my tears, I toddled over there, met this dear neighbor for a hug in the sun, and clipped off a whole plastic tub of the long strands of golden berries. The "harvest" was enough to line our kitchen windowsill and make a wreath for our daughter's first apartment . . . saving the best sprigs for Mom's Bridge Club centerpiece.

 

The look on Mom's face was priceless. She was so happy and surprised! I knew it was yet another blessing from the Gardener, taking a bitter situation and making it sweet, for both of us.

 

 

 

This morning, those golden berries had burst into their fiery orange splendor, with the golden "coats" still on. I'm sure it's the same at Mom's house. The Bridge Club will be totally impressed!

 

Thank You, lovely Gardener, for the way You weave the vines of love around us and through us. Thank You for these little "coincidences" that comfort us with the knowledge that every need will be met, every hunger filled. Thank You for always turning what seems to be a bad situation into something good and precious and right, with blessings that burst open in warm colors in our hearts.

 

Can't wait to see what You come up with to help me clean my bathtub when the grapevine's out of there! †