May 2026 . . . .

“Bonsai”

This past fall I experienced disappointment. And you might well say and so it goes. But this is in no way intended to be compared with anything else, anyone’s tribu­lations, nor to be taken particularly seriously. Just a moment I feel like reflecting on. Spring is only just now arriving, with birdsong and pollen and the promise of blooms. I had planned to transplant a bonsai I had been tending. Those plans, like they occasionally do, are no longer.


It would bore you mightily to hear the details in six years of managing a tree in a little pot. It may very well bore you to hear about what happened this fall. If it does, know that the point has nothing to do with plants and everything to do with living and writing and how we navigate through adversity. That being said, perhaps I should stop typing and sit back and drink tea and let you move on to something else, reading a story or poem or streaming a show or taking a nap with your hat down over your eyes.


I saw the first brown needles on the juniper in September. Didn’t worry about them because this happens from time to time with coni­ferous plants. And because the brown needles are a metaphor, yes, of course I did worry about them. I won’t lie to you. What was I doing wrong? It was a weird summer after all, full of blistering sunny days and long periods of rain. No drought, though. So I assumed the juniper was getting too much water. Get it out of the rain. I picked up the soggy-soiled pot and lugged it to the front porch.


Yes, the tree was living in a pot. Had been for a number of years. Six, to be exact. Six. A long time, in human years, even if not in tree years. In bonsai time. The pot was big, and as bonsai pots go it was too big. Was it root­bound? Possibly. Were there instructions for caring for root­bound bonsai? Right there, on the internet. Many different sites with lots of conflicting advice. I hesitated following those instructions. (By the way, also a metaphor.) Also, there was bonsai wire wrapped around some of the branches, to shape and direct them. Was I always stressing the tree and didn’t know? Did I go too far? Not intended as a metaphor, but I could see how it might be taken as another one. I took off the wires.


More needles turning brown. But it was now late October. And being on the front porch, was the tree getting enough sunlight? I didn’t know. Were any of us? I read more about this. The online answer was that I was not watering the tree enough. Or maybe too much. Or the wrong kind of water. Which just about covers all of the fields in the Venn diagram.


I knew my tree was dying, and that I didn’t know what to do, and that anything I did at this point would be the reason I attributed to its dying, although it made more sense that it was dying from something before this, before I even suspected, and this was just the slow passing of the little tree.


And it did die, this winter, in the cold, all of its needles shed. And a small part of me still didn’t admit it to myself, even after taking my pocket­knife and scraping a small bit of bark and finding the wood beneath the bark as brown as the needles. I was handholding it on its way out. And although I tried to tell myself it was just a lesson, and I would learn and it would somehow come back and we would move on. Wrong.


So what’s with all the metaphorical reference? I don’t know. Whatever you want it to be. Love. Work. Health. Politics. The Environment. Writing. Over­coming rejection. Anything you’ve tried and failed at, things that you invested much time and effort in, but which went wrong in the end, or long before the end but you didn’t know until it was too late. Events in our lives we didn’t learn a single thing from. Frustrations that we all experience from time to time. Life is a bonsai, a bonsai is life.