The Apple Tree My Neighbor Cut Down

I was three hundred miles away holding my sister’s hand in a recovery room when a text came through from a number I didn’t recognize. “Some guys are doing tree work in your yard. Thought you’d want to know.” I read it twice before it made sense, and then I stood up so fast the plastic chair fell over and clattered against the tile.

My sister Sharon was still groggy from the anesthesia, tubes taped to the back of her hand, and I remember feeling like the worst person alive for even glancing at my phone in that moment. But something in my chest had already gone cold, the way it does right before you know for certain that something you love is being taken from you.

I called the number back. No answer. I called my house. No answer, because of course there was no one there to answer, I lived alone since Ed passed six years ago, in the house my grandparents built when this town was still mostly cornfields and one gas station.

I stood in that hospital hallway and I knew, the way you know a storm is close by the smell of the air, that it was the tree.

The apple tree in my backyard was planted by my grandmother in 1976. She used to tell me she planted it the same spring my mother was pregnant with me, and she liked to say the tree and I grew up together, so it had better outlive her, and it had. It outlived my grandmother, my grandfather, and it had stood through fifty years of Indiana winters, ice storms, one tornado that took the roof off the Baptist church two streets over and left the tree without so much as a broken branch. My grandmother used to make apple butter from it every October and can it in jars with masking tape labels in her handwriting, and I still have four of those jars in my cellar that I have never been able to make myself open.

That tree was not decoration. It was the last living thing my grandmother ever put her hands in the dirt for.

I grew up climbing it. There is a scar on my left knee from the summer I was nine and misjudged a branch, and my grandmother sat me on the back step and cleaned the cut with hydrogen peroxide while telling me the tree wasn’t going anywhere so I might as well learn to respect it. My own children learned to climb it after that, and then my grandson Logan learned on the same low branch, worn smooth by three generations of hands and sneakers. When my husband Ed was dying, in the last month when he could still sit up in a chair for an hour at a time, I would wheel him out under that tree in the afternoons because he said the light coming through the leaves was the only thing that still felt like ordinary life. I buried him in the fall, and that October the tree gave more apples than it had in years, so many that I gave away three full bushels to the church food pantry, and I remember standing under it thinking that some things just keep giving whether you’re ready to receive them or not.