A house can be sold before a tree learns fruit.
I know this because I planted heirloom apple seeds at my great-grandmother Maxine’s house, in a bare place near the house I was allowed to disturb. I pressed them into dirt and covered them as if a hand could make a future stay. I do not remember whether I watered them enough. I remember believing the ground would remember for me.
The apples had not produced when she moved to a house easier to care for. They may never have come up. They may have leafed and been mown down by someone who did not know what had been planted there. They may have been pulled as weeds. They may have grown into trees unlike the apples I thought I was saving, because apples from seed do not promise to return as themselves.
I still think of them, not as trees exactly, but as a question left in the dirt at Maxine’s house: whether root ever took, whether a small green fruit ever held at the end of a stem where no one was looking for it.
Today, in June heat, almost ninety degrees, I lay beneath other apple trees after bloom. The fruit was just forming, hard and green under the leaves, each one carrying the small dried star of the flower it had survived. Thumb-sized, hidden, numerous. Green among green. Hardly visible unless the eye adjusted.
Above me, a redbird made himself known.
Not by song first, but by color: apple red before the season, a small bright error among the leaves, as if the tree had let one fruit ripen into wings and kept the rest waiting. He moved once, and the branch seemed to remember autumn. Then he held still while the unripe apples stayed green around him.
The grass was warm against my back. My shirt clung at the collar. The shade did not cool so much as cover. For once, I stopped asking my body to remain upright.
No revelation came.
Only apples.
Only the redbird above them, bright before the crop. Only fruit beginning by losing the flower, and even then not hurrying. Weeks from sweetness. Weeks from weight. Held to the branch by a stem no wider than a thread.
I save seeds and pits because I do not know how not to: peach stones, apple seeds, cherry pits drying on a sill, folded into paper, forgotten in a coat pocket. Not every seed opens. Not every pit roots. Some need cold. Some need darkness. Some need more winters than anyone nearby is willing to give.
A near-distant spring is still a spring.
Let me be foolish enough to put what was saved into the dark. Let me hope the crop produces after the planter leaves.
The trees at Maxine’s house may be gone.
I do not know.
That is the ache.
I lay under these other apples in the heat while the forming fruit hung above me, and the redbird burned briefly where no apple was ready. The branch did not explain itself. The fruit did not answer for the lost trees.
Somewhere, in a yard no longer ours, the ground kept what I put there or did not.