My mom died four years ago today. And I actually made it to 9:00 pm before remembering.

Does that mean anything? Meh, who knows …

The title of this post is a double-reference, to both this blog and my mom’s fruit trees. (It is not, however, a reference to my mom. No, that would be creepy.)

After my dad suffered an aneurysm in Taiwan in December 2014, my mom dropped everything and moved there to take care of him, only coming back to the US for about two months out of the year. That left me to take care of their house the rest of the time, which I admittedly did a pretty shoddy job of. She would ask me to send her photos of her beloved fruit trees once every few months (I think just to make sure I was actually driving up to Irvine to take care of stuff), but things slowly just fell into disarray in the back yard.

When my mom went into cardiac arrest in October 2018, also in Taiwan, and then died after being in a persistent vegetative state for 14 months, the house basically went to shit. I just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to give the house — and especially her trees — the proper care needed.

Making the decision to clean out the house, have it remodeled, and then rent it out was the hardest I ever had to make. But looking back, there’s no doubt it was the right decision.

We’ve had both professional gardeners and the tenants helping to take care of her trees for the past year now. And damn, it shows. The weekend before last, we stopped by to pick some wax apples and persimmons, and the sheer volume of fruit those trees are producing again makes it pretty clear that they’re being well taken care of.

My mom would’ve been pleased.