Apples
It’s wet. Just a second ago it was solid. A smooth red globe. Now it has collapsed in a mash of spit and juice. The horse’s lips against my hand. The light is golden and the leaves are golden. At the very end of a road. Just a few minutes ago, I picked this ugly apple off an unpruned tree. I held it until it got warm. I held it while I talked with my new friend. Her hair is long, her eyes are gentle. I had to lift my arm up high and get on my tippy toes to reach the apple.
Spending an hour, maybe two, with my hand resting on the horse’s body. I am frightened, especially, by the breadth of her chest, the space between her legs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody so massive. It takes me a long time to feel comfortable enough to approach her. My eyes now feel impossibly wide and I am a little out of breath. The field we are in is not just beautiful, it is also well fertilized, flat, good for vegetables, not for hay. She talked to me for a while about hay until she realized I don’t know anything about hay.
It was a hot day but it got cold and windy quick. A black and white dog was jumping all around but it did not startle the horse. As I write this, my hands are sticky from apple juice. The horse’s mouth (that is just as familiar with food as it is with human guidance) found the apple and crushed it effortlessly, but only kissed my hand. I am laughing in disbelief that the day has unfolded this way. I find meaning. I end up, always and exclusively, exactly where I am. I found myself at the end of this road because I was feeling particularly grateful for apples.
I broke down. Awake all night long, I thought I saw someone in the grocery store when it would have been impossible. I almost totaled my car in East Gloucester. I pulled over to the side of the road and called Mary. The sun was rising where she was. She asked me to slow my breath and she talked to me about sanctuary. With my fingers, I dug a bowl into the dirt on the side of the road.
After I was awake all night, I still had to work. In order to quit weeping, I devised this plan, that we discuss all our favorite parts of life in alphabetical order. The thing about the alphabet is that when someone asks for a word that begins with A, you will say Apple. An apple is, iconically, a beginning. An apple is a biography of its season. That’s what a friend told me, and her pastor told her. I told this to a new friend who said yes, and this year, with that late frost - the flowers froze on the trees and some farmers thought there’d be no crop at all. But there are still apples, and they still taste good, they just look small and kinda wrong.
I was making an alphabetical list because I was having a very hard time remembering anything that I enjoyed about life. There’s a name for this condition and it's very common, it’s a medical condition and I ended up going to the hospital to address it.
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Mary called me when I was chopping an onion. I was holding the knife just the way she taught me.
I put the onion down. She told me that when she listens, she’s trying to
show up as an empty field.
She asked me how I was doing. I told her about the horses I met. In the moment, that seemed like the only important update.
I told her they were there at the end of a long road, in an empty field. Four massive white horses. I stood beside one, touched her mane with my left hand, and with my right I held an apple to her lips. Heat radiated off her body the way heat rises off sidewalks in a city.
Warm wind was blowing and I was getting cold. I left with sticky hands and drove to the lake. There was apple juice and horse spit on my palms and steering wheel, I didn’t care at all.
Mary laughed, four white horses you said?
I said yes.
How did you meet them?
Through a woman I met by chance.
Does she own them alone?
No, with her partner.
Is her partner’s name …?
Yes.
Turns out almost 20 years ago, Mary had photographed these horses for a magazine, in a different context, in a different town. Neither of us gasped or anything like that.
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I told Christina about all of this yesterday. We walked through a meadow of deep snow, there was no path. And while we were moving our legs, the clear white horizon gave the effect that we were standing still. She made me percolator coffee and poured it into small glass cups with golden handles. She encouraged me to put a spoon of brown sugar in my drink.
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You ever rub an apple on your clothes until it shines? Stare into the dots? You think they look like stars? The skin is a photograph. Light reaches around the tree’s leaves, and bleaches the color. The interstitial spaces brightly glow, and the hidden places remain rich, like solemnly pigmented. That’s how I see it. But I got so low that I didn’t want to eat any.
The apples they gave me in the hospital were red delicious and covered in wax. On my last day there, my new friend gave me a milk crate full of apples from her orchard. I thought I was healed then. The fragrance of them made no sense under the fluorescent lights.
Everything that led up to this moment, I don’t know if it’s so important anymore. I wanted to write something linear. The end of the story would have been the white horse, at the end of a road, in the early evening. But how about I mix time, all time up, as if everything happened just the other day.
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September
In my mind, I am slowly going through the alphabet, listing the things I love about life that align with each letter. There are so many things, I spent yesterday just on A. Apples, all the wacky things that happened this year are there, reflected. The bug marks, the rain, all of it. Cyanotype type light adjustments, where the leaves affected it.
Apples are also a biography of my crooked teeth. When I bite into one, I see the mark of one tooth behind another. Every bit of my life, I see marks of my crooked teeth. My friend talked to me about apples, she also told me about the word “ecstatic.” That it really means something like to be moved out of place. Ecstatic begins with E not A but whatever.
My nephew calls me Auntie Apples. I’m not exactly sure why. He’d say Apples! And then do something naughty like draw on the wall. Like a good aunt but a bad sister, I just watched him draw. He and I were younger then. That was before my hands were cut up from work. My friend held my hands and asked, where’d this come from, and this? And then they kissed every blemish.
The other day when I was listing my favorite things just to keep going, my friend told me I was beautiful. I asked, even now? With my eyes swollen like this? They said, even now, and especially. You are changed. We are trying to figure out what to do with what’s left. The love that puts you back together is always greater than whatever broke you.
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Yesterday, when we were saying goodbye, my friend wrapped her arms beneath my coat. I walked away and she said, I love you, I just thought you should know. I felt so flustered when I went outside that I couldn’t figure out which direction to walk home. I just stood still.
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Here and there horses graze
on somebody’s acreage…
Enough of these lessons? I mean
didactic phrases to take you in and out of
love’s mysterious bonds?
Joanne Kyger, September
