Picking apples

On Saturday, Pat and I stood under my grandmother's apple tree on the edge of the tobacco field. There used to be about six apple trees in her backyard. But wind and lightening and drought and age took most of them. There were pippins, horse apples and early girls. When I was a little girl, I remember running around the backyard as my grandfather grafted limbs onto the trees, trying to get other varieties to sprout and bloom and produce sweet fruit. But now this is the only apple tree left, and it lives nearly alone now. Only the deer visit regularly, and we stood where they congregate, too, adding our sneaker imprints to the hoof prints scattered like confetti on the clay. The bottom branches were empty. They'd gotten there first. So we reached up into the tree, pulling the apples off above our head, dropping them onto the grass and into the tobacco field for the deer to find later.