Meg flew out of the church doors, through the parking lot and straight into her grey Kia Soul. The first matter of business was to get the dress off of herself and change into anything else as soon as humanly possible. She turned the car on and slammed on the acceleration causing the poor vehicle to growl in annoyance and speed up, slowly, at its own pace. Meg’s house was only fifteen minutes away, but she made it in thirteen as she sped through the empty Ohio roads. The ride was silent. She didn’t have the energy to choose music. As she drove, she let the sound of the engine be her instrumentals and the whistling of the outside wind her vocals. Numbness dulled her senses to the point where she felt that she was watching another Meg Chukar drive, floating above it all in nothingness. The corn fields broke away to reveal a small cluster of residential houses that counted Meg’s home as one of its own. She turned into her driveway, stopped the car and got out, leaving the engine running. The January winter air was freezing, and her hands were already losing their color in the ten steps it took to reach her front door. The moment she entered the house, she hurried up the stairs to her room, threw off her cold wedding dress and changed into a warm sweater and a pair of comfortable sweatpants. Returning to the mudroom, she swirled a scarf around her neck and threw on the thickest coat she owned and her padded gloves. She nestled her feet into three pairs of socks and slid them into her winter boots. As she walked back out the door and into her car, she already felt miles better, as if the warmth of her new attire was melting away everything that had happened in that church.

The emptiness of the world surrounding her gave her the impression that she owned everything she could see and there was no one to take it from her. She found strength in her aloneness as she drove the car a ways away to a nearby park. It was cold, but there had been no snow yet, so the ground looked dead and decayed without the usual white coating that would almost give it a soft rebirth before spring. She parked and made her way to empty looking tree that stood towards the back of the park. It wasn’t very tall as far as trees are concerned with a short and stubby trunk as its base. Where the tree was impressive was in its width. Long branches sprung out of the trunk, first very thick, thinning out the farther they went and breaking off into smaller branches reaching out into the distance. The canopy of dead wood formed an almost perfect semi-globe around the trunk, with the lowest branches almost parallel with the ground underneath. From afar it almost looked like an oversized mushroom. It was as if the branches were in the process of forming a cocoon around the trunk to keep it safe from oncoming danger.

Meg made her way over to the hibernating pear tree, grasped a sturdy hold and with the speed and fluidity of someone who had climbed it before made her way to the inside of the cocoon and found a comfortable notch in the wood to sit. This was her favorite place go when she was bored or felt whimsical or just needed to be by herself with her thoughts. That day was an instance of the third.

Ironically, the special place of hers that was giving her comfort and solace, was a gift from her father on her thirteenth birthday. David Chukar was botanical chemist who specialized in GMO development. He was involved in finding ways to mutate different plants so they could grow bigger, last longer and resist certain environmental factors that would have otherwise killed them. When Meg was a child, understanding nothing of chemistry let alone genetical engineering, she once asked her father what his job was. His response would be: “I’m a doctor for fruits and vegetables. I make sure that they become healthy adults, so that you can eat them and be a healthy adult”.

Every year, for her birthday, David would give her different kinds of vegetable seeds for her to plant in their back yard and tend to until they produced their goods. One year he gave her tomato seeds, the next year was peppers, a few years after that she received cucumbers. On the days of her birthday, David and his daughter would go outside and plant them. He specifically chose vegetables because they would grow and yield sometime during that year and Meg would be able to see the results sooner rather than later. She would start to grumble in that cute childlike manner that the seeds were always vegetable seeds, and he never gave her any fruit. David would then ask her if she was willing to wait a few years before anything happened. She never wanted to wait that long and would shake her head no with confidence and a grin as if claiming she never wanted the fruit in the first place. It was when she entered her teens when David switched up the formula and gave her pear tree seeds. “The teens are a long period to get through” he said to her, “and it’ll be important to be patient. But you won’t be alone. The pear tree will grow up with you and hopefully by the time you move out of your teens, it will have given you pears.” Meg specifically ask that the seeds be planted in the small park near their home. She had said that she wanted it to have space to grow as big as it possibly wanted. When David asked her if she thought the tree would be lonely, she replied “not with a sister like me” in a matter-of-fact kind of tone. Ever since then, new seeds stopped being a birthday gift.

As the pear tree’s branches cradled its older sister, Meg thought to herself that if there was any perfect time for a pear to grow off of a branch, it would be right at that very moment. But no flowers bloomed from the extremities of the wood and no fruit followed; of course not, it was January.