How 'Bout Them Apples

On one recent afternoon, I was sitting in my kitchen puttering away on a nearly-finished manuscript.  Progress was being made, but the pleasant distraction of working by a big bay window looking out to the street can limit how much gets done.

I notice every passerby, as my peripheral vision catches every neighbor out walking their dogs, every salesperson wandering door to door.

What caught my eye that afternoon was a mother and daughter as they slowed down at the edge of my yard to notice one of my two apple trees.  

The taller, deep green Honeycrisp nearer to the house has yielded, in the past five years, exactly one perfect apple.  It doesn't flower much, and never quite seemed to recover from the trauma of having most of its branches torn off as a sapling.  That damage was done by a young buck deer scraping the velvet from new antlers, and I wasn't sure it would survive.  What few flowers it produces now are out of sequence with the other tree, and are the farthest thing from fruitful.  This year, it produced one withered apple, a sad little object no larger than the tip of a thumb.  

But then there's the dwarf Fuji I planted nearer to the sidewalk to crosspollinate with the Honeycrisp.  It's not as heavily leafed, and stumpier, but is nonetheless going like gangbusters year after year.  Even after I pruned away full third of the new apples back in the spring, the branches droop heavy with growing fruit.

It was the Fuji that the daughter noticed, and she excitedly pointed it out to her mother.  They stopped, and considered the tree.  The girl asked an question, and her mother answered her.  "Yes, that's an apple tree," I could see her say.  A huge smile spread across the girl's face, as her eyes danced across dozens of apples.  The sparkle in her eyes translated into excited little jumps, as she pointed and counted the apples with such energy that her little body needed to leap a bit.

It is possible, I realized, that she might not have seen an apple tree before.  There aren't any others in our neighborhood, not visibly in a front yard, at least.  Or perhaps she'd gone apple picking, but never ever seen an apple tree while simply out walking. 

Years ago, before those apple trees were planted, before I'd even begun my first tentative attempts at gardening, I'd often wonder at how it is that America's suburban neighborhoods are so devoid of fruit and harvest.  

Now, it's not just the sweetness of those apples that I enjoy, but the pleasure that others take in their existence.  

The First Blossom of Healing

Three years ago on Easter, I preached about the two little apple trees I'd planted out in my front yard.

I preached about resurrection and the new life, to be fair, just like that day requires. But the framing image changes year by year, and that year, it was about them apples.

Wind back thirty-six months, I was homiletically marveling at the resilience of a dwarf Honeycrisp, one that had been brutally mangled by a stag.   Deer being what they are, my plans for the growth of that recent planting didn't matter a bit.  New antlers itched for their velvet stripped away, and the sapling was the unfortunate recipient of that desire.  It was reduced to nothing more than a branchless stick.

But as that sermon told it, to my surprise and despite it all, the tree was recovering.  The bark healing, and a few tender leaves were making their appearance.  

Go, little tree, go, I thought.  It's the sort of thing that stays with us, those of us who know how hard life can be.  I had good-hearted congregants ask, months later, hey, how's that little apple tree doing?

That was three years ago.  Though it's grown, it's a bit awkward, with irregular branches and a spotty canopy.  It leans a bit to the East, and has grown upwards as fast as it can, a single slender main trunk reaching skyward, as if attempting to depart this wounding earth.  

It has also, traumatized as it was, not once offered up even a single blossom.  Next to it, the squat Fuji I planted at the same time started producing sweet red apples last year, after blooming every single year.  But the Honeycrisp showed no such inclination, year after year.   Not a bud.  Not even a hint of budding.

Even so, I've tended to it, giving it a nice deep watering now and then when drought parched the soil to dust.

This last week, as I puttered about the yard weeding and amending soil, I went to inspect the trees.  The Fuji was a riot of pink-white flower.  And my wounded, struggling Honeycrisp?

There, far up the long snaking main trunk, a little couplet of blossoms high out of reach.

Healing takes its own time, and whenever it comes, it's welcome.  

Bad Apples

 

As the season for harvest arrived, the little apple tree in our front yard was finally yielding.  It's a dwarf Fuji, planted as a sapling half a decade ago, and it's really not done much up until this year.  

Last year, there were apples, but a historic drought meant they were half-sized, with flesh the flavor and consistency of balsa wood.

But this year?  After a spring in which the tree was spangled with blossoms, I carefully pruned away about half of the newly growing fruit, allowing the plant to pour its energies into what remained.  That, and a good season of rain?  They did the trick.  

It yielded several dozen nice plump apples, of the size one might expect to find at Harris Teeter or a farmer's market.  I'd expected, as the apples had matured, that they'd be devoured by the neighborhood squirrels, the same critters that take about seventy-five percent of my tomato crop each year.  But none of them were touched, and I never had to go charging out of the house to roust a brush-tailed bandit from the branches.

The why of that seemed obvious.  The apples looked terrible.  There were plenty of them, sure, but by the time they reached maturity, they were all covered in a mottled blackness.  It started slowly, but the further into the season we went, the worse they looked.

I wasn't quite sure the cause, but as I don't spray any chemicals on my plants, I thought it might possibly be some form of blight.  A mold, perhaps?  But they didn't seem to be rotting, at least not so that I could tell.  There was none of the softness of decay.  They were plump, full, and looked a bit like they'd just finished a shift in a West Virginia coal mine.

Which was another possibility that occurred to me, to be honest.  Wave after wave of smoke from Canadian wildfires have swept over the region again this year, and coupled with the ambient particulates already floating about in this urban region, these filthy fruit would have received coating after coating from months of airborne pollution.

A bit of Googling, though, brought me to the conclusion that it was not that.  Instead, it was likely sooty blotch, a fungal infection that spreads over the surface of many fruit, particularly in moist conditions.  

I was curious, though, as the apples reached their fatness.  Might they be edible?  Reddit said yes, totally. Just wash them.  

So I picked one, and brought it inside.  The skin was foul, but unbroken.  I put it under the kitchen tap, and with water running slowly over it, took a bristle brush to it.  Scrubadubdub, I went, for a couple of minutes, working my way over every square millimeter of the fruit.  

At the end of the process, that same apple looked like this:

It looked perfect.  And when I cut into it, it was tart and sweet, the flesh firm and crisp.  There was no taste of anything but apple.

It's easy to judge the worth of fruit from their surface, to look at a coating of schmutz and grime and let that first impression mislead us.  Ye shall know them by their fruit, said my Master.  Sometimes, you need to give that fruit the scrubbing of time, patience, and effort to get to the sweetness beneath.