Last week, a clergy friend of mine texted me a meme: an image of some dried-up old palm branches, brittle pale yellow and green, with the caption: “Ash Wednesday is just around the corner—Do you know where your palms are?” Then on Tuesday morning, I walked down Main Street just in time to see a tragicomic sight: three City workers with a woodchipping truck, getting ready to grind the Thompson Square Christmas Tree into mulch.

Two different ways of cleaning up old plant life; two different meanings, too, I think.

For some reason, I’ll admit, I’d never thought before about what happens to old Christmas trees after they’re picked up (by the Boy Scouts, or the City, or whatever the local custom may be). Are they thrown onto the yard waste heap at the town dump? Burned to usher in the New Year? I had no idea. Seeing a dump truck pulling a woodchipper parked on the curb put it right in front of my eyes. The magic of Christmas is over. The woodchipper is here. The tree will be destroyed, and then the truck will drive away.

The palms are something different. They sit around all year, gathering dust, slowly drying out, tucked into sacristies and rectors’ offices all around the world. And then one day—maybe on the last Sunday after the Epiphany, maybe on Shrove Tuesday night—the palms are burned. Most of the adults won’t notice, but the kids will think it’s fun. Somebody will hover, worried about the flames, and the palms will burn into rough, imperfect chunks. Later, I’ll have to sift and sort and grind them a bit so they can be used. And they are used: the burned palms become the ashes for Ash Wednesday. These are the best ashes for Ash Wednesday, I think: not the smooth, odorless ones you can buy from a store, to be shipped to your church in a small, plastic envelope; but your own ashes, gritty to the touch and smelling like smoke and pancakes.

We don’t woodchip the palms, in other words, and send them away. We reuse them. And the palms with which we praise the Messiah as he enters into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday become the ashes with which we mark our repentance and mortality the next year.

Two ways of taking out the trash. Two ways of recycling old things. But it strikes me that the ashes are much more like what we get to do with our lives. All of us experience many things, some good, some bad. And while we might wish to feed the worst parts of our lives into the woodchipper and send them off, never to be heard from again, we really can’t. We usually don’t have that choice. We can’t “just” get over things; try as we might, we can’t “just” move on.

But we can try to make new meaning from them. If they’re going to be sticking around, we can try to transform them into something else. We can take the dried-up palms stashed on the deep sacristy shelves of our lives, and burn them up, grind them, transform them and reuse them. We can take the hardest parts of our own lives, and try to see what new thing can become of them. They’ll never really go away. But that doesn’t mean that they can never change.

So, as January continues on and the beginning of Lent draws near: Do you know where your palms are? Or, maybe as a first step: Do you know what your palms are? Do you know what things you might need to burn this year, so they can become something new?