I could have been applesauce. Or a French apple tart. Or a Viennese strudel, dessert following an outdoor Oktoberfest Mozart concert. Something fit for a queen. Instead, some two-bit squirrel is eyeing me for a quick bite of fodder. I could have been a hard cider. I suppose I still might be.
They say we don’t fall far from our tree, but if your tree is on a steep hill and you get squeezed out early by self-thinning siblings and you hit the ground bouncing and spinning, you might end up, as I did, in a patch of dry grass on the edge of a grade school playground.
We live to be eaten. And it’s what we want. It’s complicated, and I don’t pretend to understand it all, but ever since I was awoken by the bees, those giant furry honey bees, and the little masons, the breeze also stirring my imagination – anything seemed possible on that early Spring morning when we got our first taste of sunshine and our petals felt like wings and we thought we might fly with the bees through the trees.
My tree was planted as part of an orchard up on the hillside sometime in the late 1800’s. There are not too many of those early trees still around. They watched the city grow slowly from across the river and up the Eastside slope – growth that took out a lot of trees.
Funny how things grow and move around and live off one another. It takes cooperation for life to thrive.
I was hoping to be part of a bushel full of my siblings that might make its way to some outdoor market. That was fantasy. My old tree is lucky to produce a single peck these days. And it’s been a hard go since that day awhile back the temperature reached 117 degrees. We prefer the chill side, but still, we’re not all that picky. We start off cold, slumber in the warm shade of summer, and finish cool. Life is not bad being an apple. And there are, contrary to idiom, no bad apples, just poor storage.
But a crop of boys one decade used the apples for their backyard baseball games. Wooden hardball bats. Talk about applesauce. The old tree was happy to see the boys grow up and move on. Another family took exceptional care of the tree. Every year careful pruning, watering, thinning, picking – and storage in their cool, dry basement. They made applesauces, cobblers and crisps, and prize ribbon-winning pies. But that family also moved on. An older couple that spent most of their time travelling abroad moved in and let my tree grow wild, apples falling and rotting, fermenting, covered with wasps in the fall. Those years the yard was full of birds. One year there were skunks. Raccoons were common. And a family of possums took up residence under the back porch, though they mainly fed off the slugs and bugs and tiny rodents attracted by the fallen apples.
All this and more my tree passes on to its apples, how to open to the coming of the bees, the loss of petals, the June drops, our capricious caretakers – the humans who covet us. We know our past, and fancy we know something of the present, but guessing our future is tricky.
One day, hidden in the schoolyard grass, I was found by a dog chasing a ball, and I was picked up by a boy and put in his jacket pocket, and I went for a walk with the boy and his dog around the playground. Over a fence I was tossed, into the back of a nursery, in among the rose bushes potted for sale.
I got picked up again, looked at closely and felt all over, and put in a paper sack with an assortment of other apples. We were weighed and paid for and carried out of the nursery and walked off, winding our way up the side streets of the hillside.
An old woman received us at the door and carried us through the house, out a kitchen door, and onto a back porch where she took us out of the bag and placed us one by one upon a table. A murmur of softening filled the air.
And there I saw my tree, out in the yard, looking as old, no – much older – than the old woman standing on the porch next to us, picking us up one by one, smelling, feeling, softly rubbing, looking closely. I don’t know what she’s going to do with us. She looks like she could be a fritter type. I’m hoping for a good old-fashioned apple pie. A la mode.
The Coming of the Toads 