BEEN THINKING ABOUT… THE PEAR TREE. The pear tree in the yard has leafed, shade dappled beneath an increasingly hot sun. Mist rose in the holler last night, turning the sunset red. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. The grass beneath the pear is already thick and raucous, overgrown where the lawn had once been mown clean. This tree was planted in a different time, a time when this place was a hopeful farm. The big front room window of the big ranch-style house promised stability, a prosperous future, of forever family gatherings, of every generation’s betterment, the simple result of obedience, of listening to the experts, and staying sagely up-to-date with every new headline.
Spring time. The kids are playing amid the trash next door, trailer house screen door slamming. The blue Ford Ranger doesn’t run anymore. Scrub trees grow up from beneath rusted axles. Soulful-eyed hound barks, chained to the truck’s bumper and barking from the shade beneath faded plastic playground slides. The Toys-R-Us ad promised years of fun. The Ford dealership ad promised a manly beach pickup truck and forever six-pack abs. The Bradford pear tree is now in late bloom, blossoms scattering the wind, a false white snowfall.
Bradford pears were planted here in abundance some short generations ago. How many springtimes does that make? Fifteen? Thirty? The smiling kids on the billboard have children of their own now but the tourists hurtling south at 70 miles an hour know no difference. The Bradford pears again bloom, clouds of white beauty belying reality.
These pears are trashy trees, trashy trees replacing better, more natural things. Their pollen beneath the microscope is pointy, barbarous, alien-looking and dangerous. The green pollen ash washes over windshields and porches alike. The trees are invasive, spreading into the wild, replacing redbud and sarvisberry, and yet produce poor, inedible fruit. The trees grow brittle, shattering apart in wind or ice. Showy things that do no good, pretending to be other things entirely, and are undependable.
Revival. The Ozarks have always been the crossroads; strange, quiet crossroads since ancient times. Crossroads of peoples and things, crossroads of ideology. Canary in the coal mine, that is who we are, progress in reverse. The latest trends may come from the coasts, but the decisions made by others elsewhere hit here harder. Our soil is thin, rocky, and for us there is less fat and muscle before the bone.
Rich, poor, sacred, profane, the built, the broken, all here beneath a springtime sun. The space between spaces is a magical and alchemical thing, a place and moment where — in the old fairytales — strange things of lasting portent happen. And fairytales teach us it is the small moments and the unimportant people who change the world. Fantasy castles and witches in the woods and winding forest paths have been replaced long ago with endless neighborhoods and truck stops and unending highways, concrete mountain ribbons with forever promises of elsewhere. Just the same, the magic of the fairytale remains, reminding us of the forever even in the crunch of boots on river gravel, sweet gospel strains of a creekside baptism, or roses and a quiet garden, reminders we are all just human beneath a hot and simmering sun.
Hope. The kids still play on the faded plastic slides, unaware of their greater world, unaware of headlines or economics or backdoor deals and southern politics, unaware how these things shape their very existence. Ignorance is not a protector, even as the sun shines down on a new generation of green leaves scarcely unfurled. Nonetheless, there is hope in each new generation even in our troubled uncertainty, even as we face the sins of our own past, even as we realize those old hopeful brochures — propaganda all — about our generic and homogenized and hopeful future, were wrong.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
