What Looks Like Less, Makes Room for Growth

I was thinking how just a month ago, we were knee-deep in snow. I remember writing about it—how lifting and carrying all that snow was becoming exhausting, how it felt like an endless stretch of winter. And yet, I can still picture myself standing near the garden one night, the twinkle lights glowing as the snow fell fast on my face, remembering how much I’ve always loved the snow.

Call me crazy, but I think I just love being outside, no matter the weather. But I am ready to make room for spring.

I do have my favorite seasons, though, and I’m grateful to live in a place where I get to experience all of them, where things change and remind us that nothing stays the same forever.

Lately, I’ve been noticing how spring is quietly making her way in. The muddy gray of winter is beginning to soften, giving way to fresh green and small yellow blooms that seem to appear out of nowhere. The sun lingers a little longer. There’s a slow shift happening, and I just love being outside in it.

Saturday, even while feeling a bit under the weather, I found myself in the garden again, pruning our very overgrown limelight hydrangeas. Being outside, with the faint sun on my back, I started to feel a little bit better. The bushes had grown tall—seven or eight feet—into trees creating a canopy over our little garden, offering coverage and a sense of being tucked in. It has become a sacred hidden place, not on purpose. But the limelights while they were producing huge blooms they were also carrying too much. They had become heavy, overextended, even diseased in some spots, and were beginning to lose their strength. The weight of the snow and ice of this winter even burdened the branches.

I knew it was time to cut them back. I was ready to do it.

The last time they were cut back this much was in the fall of 2021, when I hired a landscaper to help keep up with the work and do a fall clean-up before Jon came home from his month in rehab. I knew it would make him feel better to come home to everything done.

I remember coming home and seeing my beautiful limelights so short. I sat in the driveway and cried. I think it was less about the flowers and more about life changing all around me, completely out of my control. It was easier to place those feelings on the missing branches than to think about all that was changing so rapidly around me.

I didn’t expect to cut them back as much as I did on Saturday, but I brought them down to about 5 or 6 feet feet. If I’m honest, I was so happy to have them cleaned up, but there was an ache in seeing them shorter. A bit of regret. A sense that something is missing, even though I know this was the right thing to do. Pruning will strengthen them. It will allow more light into the garden. It will make way for healthier growth.

I think the sadness wasn’t just about the flowers. Though they have held so many stories, heard so many of my tears. There was likely more to the story. It was about realizing that life keeps going, that things continue to grow all around us, even as I carry the reality that Jon has been gone for nearly three years. He planted these limelights with me.

It was also about feeling a bit exposed. These gaping spaces—ironic—along the fence line, and in my heart.

This little space I’ve created in the garden—this memory space with roses, lily of the valley, hyacinth, tulips, flowers, and trees I’ve planted and tended over the past few years—has become a place of quiet holding. And now it feels more open.

There is a vulnerability and courage in cutting back, in seeing what once felt full now opened up. I felt it as I stood there, looking over the fence from both sides, wondering if I had taken too much. But I know it was necessary, like many things that have had to be cut back or let go of in these last few years, trusting that something good will come from it.

What once felt full now feels a little bare. Somewhat exposed. Being a widow has often left me feeling this way. I know others who feel this as they navigate loss, too. Maybe you have, for one reason or another. I wonder if the branches will grow back to what they were, maybe not the same, but they will be beautiful just in a different way.

But I’m beginning to understand something more deeply. These hydrangeas were carrying too much on their own. I know something about that. What looks like less right now is actually making space for something new, allowing something stronger to grow.

It’s how I notice things now, in rebuilding this life—that sometimes we need to let go of what weighs us down, what no longer brings life, what has quietly become too heavy to carry.

We can’t/don’t always grow back the same, to what we were before the loss—but we grow nonetheless.