HEART BEAT: The Smallest Apple Festival

By Felicia Mitchell

“The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow,” William Blake once wrote, “nor the lion the horse, how he shall take his prey.”

Nor the tree the human standing there, looking up at awe at something that doesn’t know awe from an early frost.  There’s something to be said for detachment. 

I’d driven by them for weeks, watching fruit ripen on old trees growing in odd patches of land where modern civilization intersects with the past.  I was tempted at times to park the car on the side of a road and try to pick one.  But I didn’t, no matter how handsome these apples were.

“Almost all wild apples are handsome,” Henry David Thoreau once said.  “They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.”

I was walking on Sunday morning when I spied a wild apple covered with red fruit.  The fruit was ripe, redeeming, and it was within reach.  I looked at it, and I wondered if I could reach the lowest branch or if anybody would mind if I picked just one.

I walked over to the tree and looked up at the branches heavy with fruit, fruit that had emigrated here so long ago that I had to pause for a moment to be mindful of its roots and its rights.  I looked over at a house down the hill from the tree.  Somebody in that house would be wanting these apples, right?

At the same time, the grass beneath the apple tree was littered with apples that were falling to the earth like tears shed over hunger.  I wasn’t hungry, though, or I would have had no qualms picking one right off the branch.  I was more of a tourist, curious about these small apples that ripen around the time fall leaves just start to turn.

Sometimes something small is large.  I compromised by picking eight little apples from off the ground, where some were rotting and some were not ripe all and most were pocked with black spots that made me think that nobody but I would want them.

Well, nobody except maybe some raccoon or some deer.  I wasn’t taking all of them, though, just enough to carry in the hem of my shirt to where I had parked the car. 

“There’s small choice in rotten apples,” Hortensio said in Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew.”

And then again, if you don’t mind picking through scattered, rotten apples, you might just find some edible ones. 

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,” Martin Luther said, “I would still plant my apple tree.”

Maybe I planted my apple tree after I sliced up the little apples, picking through the pocked flesh to save the rind and fruit to stew with cinnamon, cloves, and the last bit of sugar in the house.  I did toss apple cores on the edge of my woods.