Don't they look yummy?

 

Here are the makings of a delectable fruit salad, when served in a glass bowl with mint and a silver spoon. I would enjoy it thrice: first the visual beauty, then the fragrance, and finally the sweetness across my lips. 

 

Yet the purpose of this fruit is less fleeting than a crisp fall picnic, pleasant as that may be. Nestled around and in between the pulp and peels are little time capsules known as seeds. Genetic engineers try to convince watermelons and grapes that seeds are unnecessary but that is not true. Seeds are our connection to tomorrow and next century. There is a tree next to my husband's office that claims to trace back to one planted by Johnny Appleseed, two hundred years ago. 

 

A friend told me that her goal in marriage is her own happiness. To me that is like wanting all the fruit to be seedless. Joy takes on a whole new dimension when it is about tomorrow, next year and next decade. It grows exponentially when it is about my partner, our children, and the people whose lives are blessed by our marriage.

 

If I could manage to gather all the fruit bowls from the future, the ones that God will create from these tiny beginnings, which would be more consequential: my little lunch or the bushes laden with berries, branches heavy with apples beckoning to hungry people I do not even know filling their baskets? Narcissistic as I am, I cannot pretend that my lingering dessert of thirty minutes matters more than feeding numberless bellies for a hundred years.

Marriage and parenting are sweet endeavors indeed. But more to the point, they are fruitful.