Tree Branches — Falling

Whenever there’s a strong wind, I know that I’ll be spending time picking up tree branches from the driveway.  Sometimes they’re small, manageable, and I can place them in the recycling bin.  Other times, they’re limbs that I have to drag to the curb in the hopes that my landscaper can carry them away.

It makes me think.  Am I a tree losing its branches?

In my family that’s most likely the case.  We are falling away; and I have a feeling we won’t be recycled, just hauled to some neverland dump.  Food for the worms, as Shakespeare might have it.

Of my husband’s and my generation, the losses have been manifold.  He was one of six.  Now there are two left and one—my husband—isn’t doing so well.  Of my siblings, we are three when we used to be four.

The next generation?  Cousins are plentiful, but as far as my direct line—kaput!  My beautiful grandson, dead.  My granddaughter, severely disabled.  My three children prosper in their own way, but that branch from the tree of life is going nowhere.  I think of that perhaps too much.  I would like my “line” to continue.  But it stops—dead.

Then my mind moves onward, right now to the Mideast.  Talk about branches falling.  I think it was so necessary for Israel to respond to Hamas’s October 7 attack.  But Yahya Sinwar is dead.  So let’s stop the bloodshed.  What is it accomplishing now?  To keep Netanyahu’s government in power?  Is that worth all the lives wasted?

Every time I see a photo of a dead soldier, I think—why?  They are the young conscripts who never really had a chance to live.  Their parents, their siblings will spend a lifetime in grief because you cannot recover from the loss of a child.  And the reservists?  They’re called from their civilian lives, they have jobs and families and children, and all of that is shattered by their needless deaths.  Going into Lebanon again?  Really?

Do the Lebanese deserve what’s happening to them?  No.  Hezbollah, yes.  Ordinary civilians, no.  Villages destroyed on both sides of the border.  For what?  Doesn’t Lebanon have enough trouble with a dysfunctioning government?  It can’t control Hezbollah, so deal with Hezbollah and not Beirut.

Gaza?  Well, you got what you asked for.  You celebrated October 7.  It was your victory.  And for the longest time I could feel no sympathy for you because, let’s face it, you are murderous toward Jews and one another.  But even I think enough is enough.  Having lived in the area, I know that the winters can be miserable with the rain and the cold because houses, when they haven’t been bombed out of existence, are made for hot weather; and it’s always colder inside than out.  No one should have to wander through the mud to find a secure place to lay down a mattress and try to get a good night’s sleep.  No child should starve or be orphaned.

But where are the hostages?  Have you killed them all?

Branches falling.  Let’s shore them up.  Let’s cherish the lives we beget.  Before all our trees are barren.