Earlier this year, Danny took a saw to our beautiful crepe myrtle. For weeks, it stood like a headless body — a tangle of viney trunks that stopped abruptly, flat-topped like a crew cut where the saw had lopped off their leafy branches.

People get haircuts on the regular. Trees get a yearly hacking. It’s a cycle I’m very familiar with: I grew up with a backyard full of crepe myrtles, and my dad had an annual chop-the-crepe-myrtles day, when he would take the hand saw to the branches, and then take the branches to the curb, stacking them nearly waist high. For a while, they would look awful. Bare, bony, brittle wooden sticks poking up from the ground along the whole length of the fence.

But then little shoots would poke out from the bare sticks, spindly and new, glossy with fresh green life. I watched it happen all over again this year with our solitary crepe myrtle. Instead of being bald now, it has a spiky ‘do brimming with ombré leaves. But if Danny hadn’t cut it back, the crepe myrtle would have only gotten taller and taller, and never reached its branches out to its widest potential.

Our brilliant pink bougainvillea is the same way. Danny has cut it back several times, whenever it has started getting leggy. The result has been a much fuller, bloom-filled bush that has outgrown its trellis — and provided us with the inspiration to add a new purple bougainvillea to the yard, too. The new purple one is small and untouched; the pink one is beautiful, and it’s becoming quite grand. Because it was cut.We’re a lot like that, too, if you think about it. We have to trim back the excesses, the undesirable growth, the energy-sapping outlets in our lives that produce no fruit or blossoms. We have to sheer away the dead ends of our lives. Then we can stretch out our limbs, and grow to our greatest potential, and bloom.

We know it happens. We watch it, just outside our window, every day.

~ Laura