Fruit from a Dead Tree

My home sits adjacent to a once-tame now-wilding place known to the inner circle as "the secret garden".  Since we've lived here, I have ineptly labored to bring it back from the sweet subversive brink of smothering blackberry brambles and stinging nettles. It is where I go to listen to the varied thrush sing when they arrive in spring. It is where we derived the cherries for the fourth of July pie. It is a primary source for bouquets, my bee-ophilia, and the stream-bed rocks that border my drive.  Although this special place does not belong to me, if often feels that way... being only a few steps down the drive with no person or impediment to deflect my trajectory when I head that way.

As you can see, it is a special place. As you can also see, it has inspired a strong (albeit false) proprietary sensitivity - one particularly affronted when other humans walk up our drive or paddle by via the creek.

One very particular human has, of course, been walking back and forth all summer long. Not only that, but this human has also been uprooting and taking away the choicest bulbs, corms, and transplantable plants of that once-manicured landscape. Ensuring that, with each passing, he has incited a private internal riot in me that has sprung from the berserker depths of my introverted Scandinavian nature.

However, as my feathers have gotten more and more ruffled, the universe has also decided that this would be the perfect time to intercede on my behalf and point out the true absurdity of my own self-importance.  In the ever-changing flux and flow of existence, I truly have no control over anything. (Whew... what a relief!)

For, you see, in the second half of August, the secret garden's true-er nature was irrevocably restored by the fine ecologists of the county. They brought in earthmoving machinery and big flatbed trucks carrying massive loads of felled trees.  They reshaped the earth and pulled down decades of cultivation to repurpose the secret garden to better meet the needs of a salmon-spawning stream.

The fruit trees (cherry, apple, pear) that were the heart of this beautiful haven are now gone - uprooted and pushed broken to the creek edge.  The ancient mossy apple tree (perfect for cat-climbing) is quite dead. Toppled, its leaves have all turned brown and crumble into the brown dusty earth beneath it. Oddly, the fruit of its last living summer still hangs there strange and bright amidst broken limbs.  They are the sweetest of apples.  So ripe.  So final.  So pregnant w/ the complex simultaneity of life/no-life.

I'm sad for these trees.  I'm so happy for the salmon that might be. I'm so profoundly grateful to that wonderful human who worked all summer long to find new homes for those beautiful living things.