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There are several very old apple trees in my front yard.  I enjoy picking a few apples at the time. I do nothing to the trees other than pruning them once in a while so I am always amazed that there are enough wormless apples left for me to enjoy.   I share this bounty with the birds and the deer, that do a great job at eating the fallen ones and the easy to reach ones including the leaves. There is also an elusive creature that my oldest daughter saw one night as she turned into our driveway.  Her lights highlighted a large hunched back grey animal running across our driveway into the neighbors yard, it reminded her of the shape of a porcupine, badger came to my mind but neither of them live in our area. Earlier in the week I had cleaned up some scat under the crabapple tree, while I shoveled it up, I  wondered what kind of creature pooped “cigars” shaped logs. I looked it up after my daughter’s encounter to see what our “mythical” creature could be: Procyon lotor better known as a raccoon, those our very common in our parts. As I told her what animal she had probably seen she said: “raccoons are cute when they are small but halloween scary when they are large, if that is what I saw it was really big and fat” she watches too many scary movies.   I make fun of her but I have no desire to accidentally startle one as they have sharp teeth, so I stay put at night. We live in a rural area with no street lights. As I settled into the first week of October I thought about how I had missed the entire changes that the month of September brings. I had been gone for almost five weeks, a lot of weather had happened during that time. Thunderstorms with lightning which are rare in the Pacific Northwest, a windstorm and of course a lot of rain.  But for my first week back the weather was cool and sunny.

As I walked around the front yard surveying it with my eyes I noticed how much the grass had grown and how green it was, the cooler weather and rain had revived it.  There were no apples to be found on the ground but lots of evidence of deer activity. As I looked up, there in the middle of a tree that had no fruit left a large red apple was glinting in the sunshine.  It was hanging on a tall branch that grew straight up from its middle. “I should have pruned it” I thought. As I admired the deep red color I started to wonder how I could get it before it fell to the ground and became deer food.  That apple was large and enticing, its red, my favorite color, beckoned me. That apple was going to be mine for sure, why else would there be only one apple left if it was not meant to be. I could not use a ladder as there are too many branches that crisscross underneath it, I’d end up with scratches and I would damage all the little branches, I could not see a spot to rest a ladder against.  I had just heard a story about how the Toronto raccoons have been able to figure out how to open locked trash cans. I thought that there was no way I could be less smart than a city raccoon, I’d have to come up with a solution to get that apple with the minimum damage to it. As a human I had a lot to do after my absence so unlike the raccoons my mind worked on other things. But each morning during the following days as I walked around with my dog, I would go check the tree to see if that morning would be the one where I would find my prize gone, would I have missed my chance to win the race to the apple.  As I thought about it, my old catholic upbringing emerged its head and whispered: “Coveted apple, Adam and Eve, looked at what happened to them when they ate theirs.” I brushed off the thought, I felt there were plenty of apples to share with the rest of God’s creatures, they could do without this one. I don’t think they care either what color their apples are. I decided to grab a hook and to gently lower the branch, I felt the more time I spent playing, the thinner my chances of winning would be. My assumption was that I might be able to lower the branch so that it would fall from a lower elevation thus get a smaller bruise that I would then cut out.  As I hooked the branch very gently, I imagined how it would taste, my mouth was watering as if my teeth were already biting its crunchy flesh. But the movement of the branch caused the apple to detach itself from its height, it fell very fast and landed with a thud a foot from me. “Oh well” I thought, “good thing it didn’t fall on my head, the bruise will be just bigger, but it is a large apple, there will be plenty left for me to enjoy.” Hook in hand I approach the fallen fruit, bent down to pick it up, as I did so I noticed that it had an odd shape. Gravity had obviously done its job, my red apple was no longer a beautiful round globe but a half squished one.  As I turned it over I saw that it was not gravity’s fault but that birds had eaten half of it, that part had been facing towards the sky, hidden from my eyes, the weather had done the rest, oxidation had taken place I was staring at a large brown spot. As I stood back up I realized that I had had fun thinking about the red apple, I was not disappointed that the birds had gotten to it before me, the game was over, I was left with a half eaten mushy red apple. I left the red apple where it had fallen expecting the deer to find and clean it up. I turned around, grab a yellow and red apple from the other tree that still has plenty of apples for me to enjoy, bit into it, I took pleasure in its juicy, crunchy, sweet and tart flesh and rejoined Balto who was waiting for me to kick his large red ball.   

Is there a moral to this story?  I think there are many different ways to interpret this story.  Sometimes you see only half of the story, or you see what you expect to see, or you only see what you want or wish to see.  Sometimes you covet the wrong thing, for the wrong reason or for no reason at all, move on. Turning a situation into a game can make all the difference on how we feel about the end result.  I had no control over the outcome but I had control of my reaction to it. The journey is often more interesting or fun then the result or the outcome.

P.S.  The red apple was gone the next morning, there is no evidence it was ever there or that I ever coveted it.  

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/16/647599627/theres-no-stopping-toronto-s-uber-raccoon