apple tree

HEATHER BARTOS

I really hate the apple tree in our front yard.

In the spring, it’s not too bad—a bride covered with white blossoms for a few weeks in March, chilly and imperfectly dressed for the cool weather.

In the summer, it’s a huge hassle. From August through October, it drops lumpy, bumpy, imperfect red apples all over the street and the lawn. The crows peck at them, the hornets burrow into them, the ants crawl all over them.

It’s a reminder that someone else owned this house before us and that I would never have chosen fruit trees in the first place.

“I want to chop it down,” I complain every year to my husband and teenager. “We don’t even use the fruit.”

My sentimental teen used to love climbing that apple tree, but after I ask for help again and again with cleaning up the mess, I’ve made my point. 

An apple tree led Adam into temptation, into eating the forbidden fruit. But I’m not tempted to eat it. I am tempted to kill it, and with it the resentment I have that I’m the only one cleaning up after it, year after year.

Some years our neighbors in the cul-de-sac will ask for the apples. The wife knows how to can and preserve things--one of those modern women who have not forgotten the arts of the past, who appreciates homemade. Her teenaged son knocks on our door, asking if he can pick them.

Sure, I say. Help yourself.

They have a cleaning lady who comes once a week, and who also cleans house for the elderly couple next door to them. The cleaning lady asks me if she can have some apples. She says she will take them home for her daughter. She smiles when I tell her to take as many as she wants.

The husband who is part of the elderly couple asks if he and his wife can have some. He says he will have his son get a ladder and climb up and pick them all. They will use them for applesauce and jams. He’s surprised I don’t want them. I can feel his disapproval from all the way across the street when I shove the bruised and battered ones into the yard waste container.

“They are really good,” he tells me.

Down the block live two brothers who have had a lot of medical issues. I go out one afternoon to water the plants and one brother is parked alongside the house, under the apple tree. He’s picking as many as he can.

“It’s fine,” I tell him. “Take as many as you want.”

I find little apples along the side yard, buried in the taller grass, feasts for the squirrels. I decide to try one. Who knows—maybe these people are right. I rinse one off, take a bite. Nope. Still too bitter, too hard. In my head I hear the lyrics from an old hymn: “Shared until all are fed.”

Would it be wrong to chop down the tree? Should I learn to appreciate this tree that provides for so many? Should I not resent my part in cleaning up after it because many things that require work and hassle for some are blessings for others, even if they are not a blessing for me?

We never quite make the decision to chop it down. We never quite manage to make that phone call to get an estimate. It stays another year, rooted into the clay soil, doing what nature made it to do. When I am stooped over in the late summer heat, picking up half-eaten and decayed apples, I will try to remember its fragile beauty in March, its white blossoms and outstretched branches ready to embrace.

Heather Bartos has had essays in Fatal Flaw, Stoneboat Literary Journal, HerStry, McNeese Review, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction has appeared in The Closed Eye Open, Peregrine, Orca, Santa Barbara Literary Journal, and other publications, and won first place in the 2022 Baltimore Review Micro Lit Contest. She has also had short stories in Ponder Review, Bridge Eight, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, and elsewhere.