I went to eat at a tiny Persian restaurant in Nashville about two years ago. There was a chain-link fence that surrounded the parking lot. The restaurant was in a former house, so I suspect this was the original fence that marked the back yard. There were three hackberry trees that had grown up around the fence.

Nobody notices hackberry trees. They are weeds. They aren’t that pretty. The bark is bumpy and scratchy and terrible for climbing. The leaves are tiny and don’t turn any color other than brown when fall comes. The berries aren’t for eating unless you are a bird.

But hackberry trees have a lot to teach us about perseverance. They quietly grew. They get taller. These three trees grew closer to the fence. And then they grew around the fence. They didn’t push it aside. They just enveloped it. Year by year, millimeter by millimeter, they wrapped around the fence, becoming part of the fence.