We’re having our trees trimmed.
It’s always a little sad, those branches, tossed into the trailer to be mulched. 
This time around, we actually had to bring a whole tree down — an old, ailing pecan that’s been losing limbs and vitality for awhile, while still sucking up the sun and water its neighbor trees need.
It’s just a stump now, and soon even that will be ground up and gone. 

But there is new light coming in at that corner of the lot. 
And the oaks?
It might be my imagination but honestly, they look greener already without the deadwood.

It isn’t easy to do — tending to the things around us (our trees, our closets, our manuscripts) with enough clarity to know that sometimes parts of the whole have got to go, in order to let in light and oxygen, in order to let what IS there shine. 

If we don’t, we just muck along — dodging dead limbs, believing that we’ve not got a thing to wear, thinking that our stories are lost causes.

Sometimes with a little judicious pruning you find a bird’s nest, a book, the perfect little black dress.