The apple trees remind me I still don't know what I'm doing

The smarter I get, the dumber I get

My apple trees are starting to sag under the weight of their fruit. As a mom on the precipice of 40 with five and three-year-old sons, they feel like my spirit trees these days.

Last year a late frost killed most of the apple blossoms, so we haven't yet had a year where I had to deal with this. Now, the boughs dip down, almost touching the ground, testing each branch's strength and resilience under the ripening fruit's heaviness. 

Each morning I open the door to yell at the birds to "get the hell off my trees!!!" and see if a branch has broken. As if the tree knows the most it can produce without self-harm, it continues to droop further in a self-sacrificing ode to reproduction. I wonder, though, if the branches will spring back once relieved of their burden. I'm afraid they might not. 

My abdomen, which carried two giant babies, can relate. 

All fruit trees are special, but these fruit trees have unique sentimental value to me.

The day after my dad died unexpectedly, we closed on this little farm and house - as if house closings weren't stressful enough. It was like something out of a movie. 

I didn't know it at the time, but I was out of my mind with grief. I looked for signs from my dad everywhere. My favorite auction house happened to have a tree farm closing and was selling off their inventory. We now had a little farm, a little farm that needed trees - it must have been from Dad.

Most of the auctions I do are online, yet just days after moving in, we didn't have internet yet. But, I had decided that these trees MUST COME HOME for some reason. So, two of my best friends, Calla and Emily, who dropped everything to come to help us through our devastation, met my brother and me at a local Starbucks to bid on some fruit trees. 

Nobody was about to tell me that maybe I didn't need to add additional things to my plate at that moment. Perhaps a brand new time and money-intensive 1977 vintage house bought under stressful negotiations, a 9-month-old baby, keeping my job, and figuring out how to deal with the aftermath of the nightmare of my father's unexpected death were enough? Nope. I needed some trees, too. Obviously.

So, there we sat, sipping lattes and getting some damn trees. I have the best friends.

The action moved fast; we were Googling which trees would cross-pollinate which other trees, while bidding, sucking down caffeine, and making a commotion. I stepped outside the fog of grief for a few minutes to probably overpay for our spoils, driven by the adrenaline of an auction, in the middle of a suburban coffee shop with some of my best friends. Worth it.

Did it matter that I didn't yet have a truck, nor a trailer with which to pick up said trees that must leave the lot within 48 hours? No. I bought them anyway.

Calla figured out the logistics after we bought them. "Trees are therapy," she told me at the time. She was right.

So many of the "firsts" at this little urban farm were unreasonable or reactionary because I was on a razor's edge of emotion. I did tons of things that make zero sense now but seemed logical at the time.

Luckily, I have no idea how much I did or did not overpay for the fruit trees now peppering our landscape, and every year they get taller, more fruitful, and even more beautiful. Maybe they were from Dad, after all. 

Needless to say, I don't want these trees to all buckle under the weight of their produce. I want them to remind me of screaming, "I GOT IT!!!!" in Starbucks with Emily and Calla high-fiving. I'm sure people around us thought I was getting the last seat to the most sought-after concert or something. Nope, I just got that Italian Plum. By the way, I have since learned that Italian plums are pretty gross. However, I have those four trees, so there's that.

On the phone with Calla the other day, I mentioned my concerns about the apples. I even added, "I wonder if I need to build it some kind of scaffolding or something to rest its branches. Is that a thing?" Because I really didn't know. I thought about it, though. 

Calla is so gentle and kind with my lack of practical knowledge. "Why don't you try, you know, just picking some of the apples?"

Of course. Why didn't I think of that?

 
One of the great things about Calla is that she's basically a walking encyclopedia of the natural world. A little over a month apart in age, we've been friends literally all our lives. Since we were small, she's had an uncanny understanding of plants, animals, soils, and those systems intertwining us all.

"Well," she added, "when I do it, I remove any apple I see with a spot or bird peck. Then I remove one of any two apples touching each other. Apples touching one another promotes the transfer of worms."

This all made perfect sense and wasn't something I had even considered. 

Somewhere in my brain, I thought all the apples on the tree were each too valuable to winnow. I almost BUILT A STRUCTURE AROUND MY TREES TO KEEP EACH APPLE GOING. I don't know why with every other plant, I can be a ruthless pruner but didn't consider that as an option for fruit trees. I just let them be. Maybe it's a carryover of the emotions I've attached to them.

Although Calla was kind and not at all condescending, she said it as if she was imparting nuggets she'd had since childhood. As I never grew up with fruit trees, it's just a thing I didn't know.

No matter how many new things I learn on this little piece of land, and every year it gets marginally better, I still don't even know how much I don't know. It's terrifying and humbling.

So, before it got scorching last weekend, I dragged the boys out with me to "pick apples" before we actually pick apples in the fall. It was just the mid-summer weight reduction. Lest you think this was some Instagram-perfect apple-picking adventure with the kids, it was not.

I tried to pass along the lessons from Calla cheerily. "Let's find all the ones with spots!" "Can you spy two apples touching each other? Let's pick one! How many apples are left?"

But, it quickly dissolved into the baby picking everything in sight as my head exploded at the loss, and I started to cuss. Then one brother shoved the other into the electric fence that I had forgotten to unplug. I almost cried at the wasted apples as I threw them at the chickens and the older boy twitched on the couch, plotting his revenge.

I'm glad I didn't try to build an entire tree support system. In retrospect, "Couldn't you just . . . you know . . . pick some?" seems so simple, but at the time, I just couldn't see it. 

Maybe someday, the boys will have the practical knowledge I somehow missed when they are the stewards of their own trees. Or perhaps they missed the lessons this time with the Mom flipping out and the minor electrocution. Luckily for us and the trees, it looks like we'll have more chances to learn.

The apples that are left will get all the nutrients and the water and the sweetness because the trees can focus on just them. They'll be better for it. Because of our reduction, the branches are looking springier today. I wish my abdomen would follow suit.