Titus Gravenstein

Two apple trees hunched like aging gnomes in the big side yard of my childhood home. Mom and Dad planted the pair of semi-dwarf saplings five decades ago. One is a Yellow Delicious with a scabby intermittent crop, as though it always resented having been placed there. Mom didn’t dislike the tree—she despised it. The surest route to Mom’s bad side was to insult her. The second-best way was to slack off, and especially if you were a fruit tree. Yet her forgiveness also ran deep. After all those seasons of disappointment she could never bring herself to have the tree cut down.

The other tree is a Gravenstein. In contrast to the Yellow Delicious, the Gravenstein was one of the great loves of her life. She was completely loyal to it, picking up windfalls that began dropping in the heat of late August and continuing into September. Rarely was an apple wasted. They found their way into pies and cobblers and into jars of sweetened sauce and slices in her pantry and the pantries of her family. She never said it, but I imagine she loved the round feel of those Gravensteins in her palm. Things change. After Dad died, I dutifully picked up the apples and parked them in buckets at her back door. Sometimes she had the spunk to process a few. But Gravensteins don’t keep, and most of the fruit found its way into the compost bin. The only thing the apples fed was Mom’s increasing regret at not being fully engaged in the life she had made for herself.

Mid-August and Mom has been gone for almost exactly a year. We are trying to sell the home place, and I was up there for a cleaning out chore that I can’t remember amid the multitude of cleaning out chores that had been going on for a year and a half. Summer had ended a few days earlier in the wake of a big thunderstorm that rent the sky and sent torrents of rain spilling onto two months of accumulated dust, pollen, and wildfire ash. The daily temperatures dropped by ten degrees. A dry season that had begun a month early was shutting down a month early, a sort of sliding climate calendar accompanied by a collective sigh of relief for the new normal.

I glanced over at the Gravenstein. The summer-brown grass was littered with windfalls in various stages of decay. Something shifted in my bones, somewhere around my sternum, as if the accumulated atoms of calcium, potassium, and phosphorus from eating all those Gravensteins over all those years began to spin their subatomic particles in the same direction. I stopped whatever nameless chore I was doing, rummaged up one last dirty white bucket with a broken handle, and started filling it with rotten apples. Out loud I apologized to Mom for ignoring the tree. The bucket filled quickly. I tumbled the apples over the old fence, ostensibly for the deer even though they had already been slipping between the sagging wires and into the yard to help themselves.

My bones finally had a talk with my brain. Bones do this when they have carried us around with their deeply held knowledge of a place. This would be the last summer a Titus would pick those Gravensteins. Generally, we never know when the last time for anything is happening. But this ending seemed like a solid bet. There was one more wooden fruit box still in the garage, handmade and heavy. I started filling it with the not-too-bruised-still-strawberry-striped apples. One of the large low-slung limbs was dying, flayed bark exposing a brown gnarl of tree bone. Stepping up onto the limb I picked some low-hanging apples and used the front of my work shirt like a marsupial pouch to carry them to the box.

When I got the box of apples back to town, I didn’t have time to deal with them. Kim and I were supposed to be packing for a deep sea fishing excursion to Vancouver Island, one of those trips to the middle of nowhere, which is really the middle of everywhere, and nothing could be forgotten. So I gave some of the apples to our friend Kathleen. Our bones have been knit together for a very long time, and she loves Gravenstein applesauce. Later that evening I gave her the rest of them.

A few days after that first picking, I was telling my friend Gary about the apples. His pupils dilated.

When are you going to be there next?

In about an hour and half.

Okay, see you there.

The apple tree continued to drop fruit like heavy round tears. By the time I arrived, Gary had already gathered a box of windfalls. Gravenstein aroma wafting from the back of his pickup set my bones and brain to whirling again. We sat on a piece of old telephone pole Dad had placed between yard and the driveway to keep people from driving onto the grass (more than one vehicle has been towed out of there during the wet season). We told stories. Gossiped. Extolled a few books. Complained about others. Realized that we shared a heritage of moody Irish and simmering Italian. Our lanky legs were stretched into the gravel driveway. Our bones began to shift, to recognize something deeper than the banter. I’m certain it was the apples already working their way into whatever constitutes a shared soul.

After Gary left, I picked another box of apples. That night my bones were telling me to ignore the To-Do List for the fishing trip. My world needs less gravitas and more Gravi-sauce. I pulled out a cutting board and apple corer, whisked a short knife against a steel with that sharp sound that only a knife whisking against a steel can make, and started processing Gravensteins. Deep into the late summer night, the peeled chunks of white apple flesh had filled a two-gallon stock pot. To keep the slices from turning brown I set them to cooking immediately. Mom liked her sauce sweet. I added extra sugar.

I was tired and waited until the next day to can those last quarts of sauce from the Titus Gravenstein. I was supposed to be packing. But when I pulled the jars of chunky white sauce from the boiling canner my bones were singing. The jar lids didn’t snap closed. Rather, they pulled themselves gently onto the rims. I can’t say why. Maybe I’ll give applesauce for holiday gifts. Maybe I’ll remain the hopeful romantic and believe that sharing apples can somehow articulate our collective skeletons into a community. Maybe my expectations are too high. In the end I only know that Mom would have been happy.