Abscission

There are small red buds on the crab apple tree, which means spring is here. Admiring the buds, I noticed a branch that still has last year’s leaves. The rest of the tree is bare, and this one branch is still adorned with shriveled brown leaves. Why?

I followed the branch up and found it had broken off and was dead. The leaves hadn’t dropped because the limb died before the tree went through its annual chemical process of ungluing its leaves, and so they stayed there, stuck.

Those stuck leaves found me on a day – a week, a month – I spent awash in anxiety. My son is mostly grown up and off in college, and I have been watching him navigate all the ups and downs of that path with fear and trembling – classes, high-pressure athletics, friendship, love. Most days my worry about his potential hurts is louder than any emotion my own life generates. It is exhausting.

Then I saw that apple tree with its dead branch holding onto its dead leaves for all it was worth, while right beside it the tree itself was alive, a beautiful blank slate about to burst into new leaf, blossom, and fruit. I pulled out my phone and searched “trees leaf drop how,” and found the process of trees letting go of their leaves is called abscission. It is a hormonal process where shortening days cue trees to dissolve the abscission layer, the connection between the leaf and tree. And the leaf falls.

I stood there with pruners in one hand and phone in the other for a long time. My heart broke a little as I thought “I have to let him go.” But that isn’t it, really. My son is not a dead leaf, and I am not a broken branch. No, the lesson that crab apple is trying to teach me isn’t to let my son go. It is to let last year’s relationship go. Last year’s relationship is a leaf we don’t need anymore. There is a new one coming.

And of course abscission is a hormonal process. A mother’s connection to her child is ferociously hormonal, as is the passing of fertility. I have no evidence for it, but this deep anxiety over the well being of my one and only, newly launched child feels as hormonal as did the irresistible urge to respond to his cries as a baby.

I am not a tree, and abscission will require more of me than it does of a tree. But I cannot go into my son’s spring as a broken branch, holding onto last year’s life.

I must make the effort, or I’ll be too consumed with holding on to notice the buds about to break free.