Wednesday, May 9, 2012

"Jesse, come here, I want to show you something." A father beckoned for his son to come over to where he knelt in the freshly plowed soil. The tawny haired five-year-old with dimpled elbows and a round, yet babyish face ran to his father's side and stared at his dad's open hand with blue-eyed amazement.
 "Yes, daddy?"
"Do you see this seed?" The father drew his hand up for closer inspection for his son. It was a large brown seed smooth and glossy in the spring sunlight.
The boy bobbed his head seriously.
"And you remember when you told me you wanted to have your own pears?"
The boy grew excited. "Yes, Daddy!"
"I'm giving you this pear seed and this plot of ground. If you take care of it and help it grow, doing everything I tell you to, one day you will have many pears and they will all be your own."
"oh..."Jesse's face fell a little he looked confused. "How long until I have my own pears?"
"It'll take time. A couple years, but until then you can have some of my pears." The father added to encourage his young son.
"Ok, Daddy."
"First thing you must do is plant this seed."
With his father's help the little boy planted and covered the seed. Then his father instructed him on how to properly water the patch and when to do it. He remembered as well as he could and his father promised to help him.

Every day after breakfast the little boy would follow his father to their orchard and take out the little watering pale to the pump, fill it up and water the marked plot where his seed was. When he was done he would play among the trees and watch the birds fly among the branches helping his father with little things like scaring the birds away from ripe pears and finding deadly caterpillars among the  leaves of the bushes.

His tree started out as a tiny shoot and he was very excited when it first began to poke it's green tendrils above the ground.

He didn't notice but every time there were weeds around his plot his father would root them up and fertilize the ground with a skilled hand.
After several weeks his father called him over to the plot after he had finished watering the ground.
"It's time you learn to do a little more," he said, "Let me show you how to weed from around your tree."

With this pattern the son learned all the different aspects necessary to make a flourishing tree. Years passed and there were days the son forgot or was too tired to take care of his tree properly and it didn't grow as well as it did at first. His father told him, he could always ask for help and he would be there, but the son didn't think his father had enough time to look after his one tree when there were so many he was always working on.

So he grew a little lazy and discouraged by the state of his sorry looking tree. His father saw it and was sad also, knowing the first harvest of pears would be a poor one for the boy. Yet he left him to do the work and waited for his son to ask for his help.

One day a caterpillar started eating all the leaves and the boy went at his old job of finding them and pulling them from the branches but it wasn't enough! There were to many. He was almost dispairing his tree would die when he realized he should ask his father. Going to the man he asked for help with his tree...

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