The Apple Row Along My Uncle’s Lane

The chainsaw was still screaming when I turned off 10 Mile Road and came up the orchard lane.

I heard it before I saw anything, and I knew which trees it was before I got close.

Four of the six were already down. Forty-year-old Northern Spies, lying across the grass at the end of the west block, their branches still holding a few yellow leaves and a handful of apples nobody had picked.

My uncle Abe was standing in a cloud of sawdust with his ear protection on and his saw biting into the fifth trunk.

He did not look up. He did not have to. Everybody on the Ridge knows the sound of my car.

I parked on the grass and walked out to him. I did not run.

I have never been a runner, and by then there was nothing left to run for. Four were gone. The fifth was going.

He finished the back cut, stepped away, and the fifth tree leaned and went over with that long tearing sound a big limb makes when it gives up.

Then he shut the saw off and pulled the muffs down around his neck.

“Celeste,” he said. Just my name, the way you would say the name of a weather report you did not want to hear.

“Those are Grandpa’s,” I said. “He planted those the spring I was born.”

“I know when he planted them.” Abe wiped his forehead with the back of his glove and left a smear of sawdust on it. “They slow my sprayer down. And nobody picks them anyway.”

“I pick them,” I said. “I have picked them every fall since I was six years old. Maren and I picked them two weeks ago. Those are the last apples on the ground right there.”

He looked at the apples in the grass like he had not noticed them.

Then he looked back at the sixth tree, the one closest to the lane, the biggest of them, the one Grandpa used to sit under on an upside-down bushel crate.

“I am putting in four acres of high-density Honeycrisp on trellis next spring,” he said. “Those old standards sit right at the end of my rows. Every time I spray I have to back the whole rig around them. It costs me time on every pass, all season, every season.”

“There are six of them, Abe.”

“And I have twelve thousand other trees to take care of. Six trees that are twenty-five feet tall and need ladders. I cannot get a crew to haul ladders out for six trees. Nobody wants Spys anymore. The packing house does not want them.”

That part was true. I want to be honest about that, because I have told this story at enough fences now to know that it is easy to make Abe sound like a man who woke up mean.

He did not. He had real reasons. They were just not the whole reason.