My Apple Tree
Condensed from “Eighty Acres”
Ronald Jager
–Year after year, it bears the fruit of blind faith…
That June evening I was about ten. As I stood on our front porch, my eye caught an unusual plant, not more than five inches high. It was the merest seedling, but my father identified it as a young apple tree. Immediately I adopted it. I would transplant it, care for it as my own, and it would thrive. When I was a man and farmed this land, it would bear good apples for me.
Dad proposed a spot between the driveway and garden, and that evening he dug up the sod for me. I planted my little tree there. In my innocence about fruit trees, I did not know that apple trees grown from seeds-rather than grafts like the trees in our orchard-are often barren or bear only inferior fruit. If my father knew it, he chose not to disturb my optimism.
I took a boy’s cre of my tree, alternately negligent and tenderly attentive. I cheered it on as it slowly prospered in the face of weeds and the regular predations of our workhorse Pearl, who was partial to its taste and tried to snatch a branch whenever she could.
Came the years when my tree had a few blossoms but no fruit. Later I read disquieting news in a high-school textbook: apple seed trees often produce a prehistoric crabbed and wizened apple. Had I only known. Still, it was a nice tree and I was fond of it, so I pruned it by the book. At least it would look good. Then I went off to college and forgot about my tree.
My back was hardly turned when it began to bear-slowly at first, then generously, then extravagantly-tasty and versatile apples. They were good for eating and for sauce, superb for drying, and more free of insects and disease than those from our orchard trees.
For 35 years now, my tree has poured forth its nearly flawless bounty. Twenty bushels is nothing for that tree. Every autumn, relatives and neighbors come to shake the branches and bear the surplus fruit away.
I had foreseen it all. This perfectual bounty is what i fully expected all those years when I didn’t know what I was doing. With even a little learning in these matters, I would not have bothered to transplant or tend the tree. it was nurtured on blind faith, and the harvest that was all but impossible becomes now all but inevitable.
