Summer of ’74: Pollinating
My secret hiding place is a small, gnarly apple orchard where fallen apples rot sweet and pungent in the heat. I like to climb the trees and look back toward the old house. There’s a weathered tool shed that smells earthy, musty, a mix of gasoline and age. It’s stuffed with old clay pots, a lawnmower, rakes, galvanized buckets of wooden laundry pins, a rolled-up hammock, and my grandfather’s hand tools. I never met my grandfather. He died before I was born.
Grandma is working in the vegetable garden at the back of the tool shed, where the sun reaches all day. She’s staking tomatoes and tying string for sugar peas. Across the half-acre, she waves for me to join her. She looks happy.
23 Years Later: Germinating
My boys are giggling inside their treehouse, slapping playing cards on the wooden floor. They’ve thrown their raggedy, half-chewed pea pods and crabapple cores in the grass, abandoned with metal trucks and dusty sneakers. In summer, they are wild and free.
I stomp to flatten the cardboard, clip the shiny S-hooks to the poles, and stretch out in the quilt of my grandmother’s generosity. The gentle rocking fills me with an unidentified longing, a fleeting nostalgia, tiny minnows nibbling my skin.
11 Years On: Transplanting
The neighbor says this backyard used to have an extensive vegetable garden. “Too bad the house flipper covered it with sod. Appeals to more buyers, I guess. Not everyone wants to take care of a big garden. But that’s got to be amazing soil.” My husband is out of earshot at the far end of the property, head tilted back, frozen in mid-step by a bewitching birdcall.
“By the way, that tree is probably eighty years old. Gravenstein, a heritage apple.”
I approach the elder tree. It has one precariously leaning branch, propped up by a plank that long ago became fused into its flesh. I put my hands firmly on the bark, test my footing in the V of its trunk. It feels sturdy, familiar.
In 8 Years: Lying Fallow
Mid-morning, the July sun is already high and hot. I drift through the garden, reconnecting with plants tended long ago in another world, letting sunlight stream into the rooms of my heart. The first summer apples have fallen in long grass. I’ll find a galvanized pail to collect them for the neighbor — she’s always making pies.
In a trance, I drag the rusty poles out on the lawn to set up the hammock and collapse into its gentle sway, a tender cupping of my soul. Sleep comes as little laps of solace onshore. Somewhere in the cedars, the resident wren dispatches his distinctive buzzy call. My husband doesn’t hear it. He died three hours ago.
3 Years Forward: Reblooming
Mid-morning, the foghorns are still moaning. I push open the gate for the first time. A hummingbird chirps sharply from behind a lilac shrub: my nest, my nest. Grapevines stretch upward from the arbor, seeking heat. I can smell a salty sea breeze, rushing across the leaves. No one’s been here for a while. The compact yard has overgrown garden beds, a fallen fence, and a mossy brick patio — manageable. There’s also a tool shed, vacant except for a pegboard with a sun-bleached guide to growing herbs. Plenty of room to store the hammock over winter. And south-facing sun would be kind to apples. Apple trees, to grandchildren. I find a galvanized watering can and give my inherited tomato plants a drink. They are thirsty for summer, like me.
First published as “Inheritance,” Being Home , Bob Kunzinger and Sam Pickering editors. Madville Publishing, 2021
