This morning I watched a squirrel gathering food for the winter. She was carefully picking the small green fruits off a spindly Hawthorn tree that grows at the edge of the woods in my backyard.
The tree isn’t much to look at. It’s small and scrawny with only a few thorny branches. And this time of year nearly all the leaves have fallen. It doesn’t get much sunlight, and struggles to survive in the rocky soil.
But every year it makes a few small green fruits. It’s not much. But it’s enough to feed a hungry squirrel for a few days.
Maybe that’s how we all are sometimes; sickly, stunted, poor, weak. Feeling like we have nothing much to offer.
But if that spindly Hawthorn tree can offer a few small fruits, maybe so can we.
It’s all we can do, really. Just offer what little we have.
The View from Mt. Hope 