It was not pretty when I got done. (The pictures embiggen.) I was pretty sure I wasn’t done, but the bin was full.

The forecast was off that day in February and it froze that night.

They say in mango forums to leave the tree alone, give it a chance to make a comeback wherever it will after the weather warms up, especially if it’s past those first few tender years.

So I waited. And wished. The top half of the tree looked utterly dead and what was below didn’t look happy at all.

Saturday it had been warm enough long enough. I went out there with the clippers: no sense in letting the injured parts kill off the rest, and besides, all those dead leaves were shadowing whatever might be underneath, and oh look there’s fungal disease on that one and that one and that one. Out!

Mangos meander. You don’t get a single trunk growing upwards, you get a kid twisting their hair in their fingers endlessly.

I found just a few places where there was blackened branch but still some green above it and those I left alone. Then I watered the tree and hoped. All those years I’d taken such good care of it, one week of warning weather that I didn’t pay much attention to because it wasn’t going to freeze and then it did and I could have avoided all that damage if I’d taken it seriously…

I had needed for some time to take out the old line of incandescent Christmas bulbs draped on it for heat and put in a new set where they all worked but I hadn’t been able to follow the line and see nor reach what I was doing in that thick growth.

I can now.

With Constance headed for home after a great visit, I went back out there this evening. There were some larger branches that everything coming off of them had been brittle and very much dead and were now gone but I’d left the main part just because, because…it all was so much and so hard to do after babying this tree for ten years.

That big V-shaped line in the foreground of the first photo had, it turned out, the tiniest new bits of green at quite a few nodes. Those were not there yesterday. There may well be more tomorrow.

This is one of the smaller branches that still had leaves despite the freezer-burning. The fact that it’s growing from a circle of leaves rather than a single one means that it will be a cluster of new branches from there.

Look and look and look! There are more sprouts all over the sun-facing side of the tree!

All it had needed was the deadened parts cleared out of its way so it could grow again.

Speaking of which, there’s another pro-democracy protest this Saturday across the nation.

We’ve been badly burned but our ideals live on. We can honor the sacrifices of our fathers. We can demand our leaders protect democracy, free speech, equal protection under the law, the right to be heard in a court of law, the rule of law itself that makes all that is America great or at least potentially great. Those are ours and we claim them for the good of all. Go team go!