Applelachia
Marie Burdett
Its limber silhouette stands stark against
a dreary winter sky, its skin the same
wood color as a bleached and battered barn.
It’s nice to see the change that comes in spring:
white blooms erupt along each lichened arm,
inviting bees to lick up sugared sun.
You see this tumbledown vignette, the same
on every rural roadside in Virginia.
Old country people used to know the apple.
When it came close to ripening, they’d go
out in their orchards, checking on the crop,
a pocketknife in palm to cut a slice,
to test the sweetness of the fruit. They knew
the taste of readiness, an apple’s prime,
which ones were best as cider, fresh, or dried.
They swore their mothers made the greatest pie.
But nowadays the cultivars they used
are disappearing like a shimmer on
a summer road. The grocery stores enshrine
Honeycrisp, Galas, mealy Red Delicious,
polished and waxed like hot girls at the spa.
McDonald’s serves six naked Fuji slices
with every Happy Meal. It seems like choices
abound, but this diversity is false.
Pink Ladies, Galas, Cosmic Crisps obscure
the real but fading generosity
of apple trees. Old names are dying with
arthritic hands, failed grafts, and withered twigs.
Who’s heard of Father Abraham or tried
the squatty, russet-skinned Pomme Gris? At school,
most children won’t have Winesaps in their lunches.
They’d pucker at the tartness of Hewes Crab —
that’s if the tree could hold a bloom against
an early frost, if winter freezes hard
enough to chill its sap. Climatic seisms
seesaw across the country. Fire blight
attacks young shoots. The cedar-apple rust
bespeckles healthy leaves. The Spitzenburg
develops every illness known to apple
and now the spotted lanternflies have come
to pierce the apple’s lifeblood from its leaves.
But somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley,
or deep in Highland County’s ancient mountains,
they’re always finding old, forgotten homesteads
and orchards, long abandoned, overgrown.
They taste the apples from the unpruned trees
that seem as lovely as the Taliaferro
that Jefferson declared the best of all.
He loved to sample every kind of apple,
had ample room for cider in his cellar.
His love for apples colonized the hillside,
thronging the grass below the garden wall
with apples, peaches, quinces, nectarines.
His cursive letters, sloped like orchard fruit,
describe ambitious pomiculture plans.
Today, his famous trees have turned to stumps.
I felled an Albemarle Pippin tree
last week. It was so brittle I could push
it over with my hands. I only used
the saw to cut away the canopy
entangled with thick poison ivy vines.
I thought its rotted thud seemed like the way
a barn gives out beneath the weight of time.
I choked on dust. I haven’t filled its spot
with a replacement tree. I know it’s not
the last one of its kind. But still, I hope
that someone will remember how it crunched
between the teeth, how smooth its fine green skin,
how tart and crisp its taste fresh off the tree.
