The Apple Row Along My Uncle’s Lane

Where to Put Them

I had always meant to plant them at Mom’s. I just had not thought about exactly where until Mom walked me out to her fence line on an April evening.

Her ten acres run right alongside Abe’s orchard lane, a gravel track a quarter mile long that goes from the road back to his packing barn.

There is a woven-wire fence between the lane and her hay field, and a strip of grass along her side of it.

“Here,” she said, and laid her hand on the fence post. “Put them here.”

“Right along the lane?”

“Dad drove this lane every day for sixty years,” she said. “Twice a day, most days. He knew every rock in it. I want his trees where he would have seen them.”

I looked down the lane toward the barn. Then I looked back at her. “Abe drives this lane every day too, Mom.”

“I know he does,” she said. And then, more gently, “I am not doing it to him, Celeste. I am doing it for Dad. If Abe sees them, then Abe sees them.”

I believed her. I want to say that. I have heard people tell this story with my mother as the one twisting the knife, and it is not true.

She just wanted her father’s trees where her father would have looked for them.

The last Saturday of April, Curt took the day off from the shop and borrowed a post-hole auger for the back of his tractor from our neighbor Norbert, who farmed next to Grandpa for fifty years.

Curt and I measured it out with a hundred-foot tape and a can of orange paint.

Twenty feet between trees, set eight feet in from the fence so Abe’s mower and sprayer would never touch them. Thirty trees made six hundred feet of row.

The thirty-first graft went into a five-gallon pot at Mom’s back door. I could not say why exactly.

I told Curt it was a spare, in case one of the thirty died. That was not quite the whole truth either.