We Have Apple Trees Here

We have apple trees here. They were planted by the family who owned our house before us, a family that thought apple trees would flourish in the sandy soil near the heavy weather of Lake Superior. The old trees’ branches are drooping, heavy with apples, so thick are the apples that they look like Christmas decorations from afar. Red and shiny and catching the light just so.

Up close, the apples are bumpy and flawed. One side of an apple will be perfect and the other side dotted with black spots. Many apples have already fallen from the trees. They collect in the high grass, a smorgasbord for the deer. Because apple trees overhang our dirt driveway, many apples are crushed by our driving over them. The smell left is sweetly rotten like a cider mill.

We used to pick the apples, putting them in a wicker basket I kept on top of the kitchen cabinet. I’d peel them, dice them, and put them in a pot with a cinnamon stick and the tiniest amount of water and we would smell the apples cooking all day. This made me feel rich and basic, able to find the good in all the apples, pretty or not. But the apples were tough, thick-skinned, hard to peel, and harder to core out the black spots and so I stopped. Better to leave the apples for the deer.

We also have pears. There is a very old pear tree that has been dwarfed by two giant pine trees. This means that its pears grow at the very top of the tree where the sun can be felt, probably twenty feet from the ground, and we can’t reach them although we’ve tried various schemes involving ladders and brooms. The pears hang on until they are pulled off though they fall eventually. I know that from being up here later in the fall, just before the ripeness of new winter gives way to snow.

The pears can be woody but they are beautiful. I don’t eat them off the tree but I have made pear compote, not lately, not since I’ve also given the crop over to the deer.

Yesterday, while our two dogs sniffed around the fallen apples, two deer passed by about fifty feet away. They stopped to look at us, waiting, it seemed, for us to move away from their apples, and so we headed up the driveway to our house. I looked back to see if they’d come to eat but they’d run off, spooked by us rummaging in their food. They don’t know us. We just know them.

I remembered a few winters ago when a herd of deer moved past our house, settling themselves amongst the apple and pear trees as if in a nest where they would be safe and well-fed for a good while. I watched them, curled in their spots in the snow, and saw new deer walk up to join them.  Later I saw the indentations in the snow where they’d eaten and slept, flawed apples and beautiful pears strewn about.