Apple Trees

So often, these days, I find myself in my grandparents’ farmhouse, standing still to watch the stained-glass rose move gently in hazy light, or I am walking barefoot down a rutted path to find adventures in the fields, in the bush, by the creek. And then sometimes I am home on my parents’ farm, darting through corridors of poplars on my mare’s golden back, or making the rounds from apples to raspberries to beans.
When I dream of these places, I am always crying the deep, soul-heaving cries I’ve only really known in dreams. I walk from here to there—never quite the same as in reality, and yet so familiar to me—and I’m torn apart because I know they’re not mine anymore. I will never be a child here again. I always end up by a few spindly apple trees, reaching to touch and take one of the last rosy apples of the season. No one ever seems to share my grief in these dreams.

When I was just barely twenty, I booked a ticket to Massachusetts, where I would spend the next three months of my life living with people my parents had never met. Not long enough to really, truly feel like I was leaving home. But in the minutes before I was to leave the farm, I realized the truth: I was leaving home. I was doing something on my own, something I alone knew with certainty I needed to do. As I rushed out to the farmyard, barefoot on damp leaves beneath the apple trees, I felt the immense grief I’ve only really known in dreams drive up into my throat. I wish I had looked it in the eye and let it take me. But I didn’t. I swallowed it and felt it beating wildly in my chest. I was just too scared to acknowledge that my childhood fear was upon me: I was leaving my family, and I would not be coming back to the way things were.

I never let that feeling out, never let it pierce me, and maybe that’s why it’s still there, a fluttering in my chest, a pressure in my throat, an echo still ringing.

Aging is not at the same pace as Time, I’ve come to see. Am I not still twenty, the future unknown, my childhood clutched in my fist like a memento? But I am a decade older than that, and I myself am a mother of four. Four. Now it is their childhood I hold. And I’m still scared. Time won’t slow down long enough to let me cry myself into peace with letting go; it won’t let me feel the fullness of these moments that every empty nester calls fleeting. But Time is out of synch with my heart. I think it’s possible I will die a young woman, be I thirty or ninety.