My favourite tree across the street is finally leafing out.

This one has grown up with my babies. Years ago it barely peeked over the fence. Now it reaches tall and broad, filling out the space between the others in the yard with outstretched branches. For the first time ever, it eclipses the 40 foot evergreens that tower in the distance, its leaves unfurling and glistening in the spotty spring sunlight, the same favourite leaves I know will glow brilliant gold come autumn.

“My, how you’ve grown,” I thought to myself this week. Like a cheek-pinching auntie, I marvelled from a distance at its stature. “So much bigger than last spring!”

The neighbourhood is slowly changing. It’s one of the gifts of living in the same place for many spring seasons: you begin to notice time and trends making their indelible mark.

Several mature trees have been removed in the past 12 months from the familiar little block we call home. Some may have come to the end of their life or met with disease, others removed for utility work and infrastructure upgrades, and still others were cut down for more curb appeal as the real estate market burns bright.

I am sad to see them go, although others have been planted nearby, as if to replace the ones we have lost. These will take years to grow into maturity, if they make it at all, and it will be decades before they bring the same shade, colour and beauty of their predecessors.

Trees for my grandchildren, if the Lord is gracious.

As I shake my head and return to tending my own yard, inspecting the well-established rose bushes in the front bed, wrestling out the quack grass and removing last season’s rose hips and dead leaves, I realize that I may have very well become the neighbour who greeted us somewhat begrudgingly when we first moved in years ago as the only young couple on the block.

“We need a Welcome-to-the-Neighbourhood Barbecue so we can teach you how we do things around here,” she warned. I picked up on her strong desire for things to stay the same forever, although to this day, I am still waiting for the promised lesson. 

I laugh at myself as I dig down into the dirt next to the rose bushes once again to get something, anything, to grow in the south-facing desert under my front picture windows — the place plants go to die. The perennials I chose last year weren’t hearty enough to survive, so this year it’s sunflowers and hollyhocks with their promise of big blooms, heat tolerance and nostalgia.

Every year I try something new, hoping that it will take. I haven’t given up yet! Between the repeated attempts to bring life from a barren patch in my flower bed and the beautiful growth of my favourite tree across the street, I realize that all is not lost. In spite of the unavoidable changes in my life, the promise of the next generation, deeply rooted and reaching ever higher, reminds me that there is beauty for ashes, gladness for mourning, peace for despair (Isaiah 61:3).

Jesus, help me not to become bitter with the changes life brings. There are so many places marked by circumstances beyond my control but I know You can be trusted to bring streams in the desert, to breathe new life into what seems lost. You are before all things, and in You all things hold together. (Colossians 1:17).