My mother was born from a green apple on a stormy autumn afternoon.
If you don’t believe this, consider that wasps are born from figs.
The apple was hard and sour when the gust shook it free to plummet into the leaf litter where it split open, and so my mother, too, was hard and sour. I envied other girls’ sweet, patient, mothers. I believed they came from apples that dropped when ripe, until I learned that most mothers came from grandmothers.
After it fell, the apple lay rotting with my mother inside, until she was found by a group of scrumpers planning to make chutney. They interrupted Sunday services and the sexton’s family adopted her.
Our aunt Meg, the sexton’s eldest daughter, rang me and my sister yesterday.
“I didn’t want to bother you,” she said, “but you’d best come home.”
The two of us timed our trains to connect so that, despite the delays of leaves on the line and lightning strikes, we arrived together, reminiscing.
“Remember when she locked you out overnight in that downpour, after you broke the bath tap?” my sister asked, muffled through her scarf.
“And you stayed up all night looking out the window at me.” My dear, soft-hearted sister. She takes after our aunt. I studied her face—nearly a mirror of my own, save those few missing teeth.
“Remember when you burnt the bread?” I asked.
“How can I forget living off nothing but soup for weeks?”
Mother never had patience for an ill-done job.
We’d shared caring duties when she began to wither. We couldn’t have paid anyone to deal with her scorn. When we finally put her in the ground, we shared a silent relief.
Aunt Meg, wrinkled face barely visible over a knitted powder-blue scarf, drove us from station to churchyard, wheel held tentatively in mittens, windscreen wipers at full speed. She accelerated at each roll of thunder, then braked in a panic.
“I didn’t want to bother you,” she said after parking across two spaces in the empty church lot, “but you should see.” She waited in the car.
Mother should have been cremated, so that she’d smoulder into ashes—but, out of courtesy to the family, we’d buried her in the churchyard.
She should at least have been mouldering in her grave, poison returning to the earth.
Instead, the young tree whose roots were beginning to tip her headstone looked fresher and brighter than she ever had, its first apples just tinged with red.
I shook the tree and my sister, huddled in her jacket, gathered. I stripped to a singlet. Rain and cold were nothing to me.
“You’d taken care of so much, and it hadn’t flowered before,” Meg said when we returned. “I didn’t want to bother you, but then the new apples.”
“It’s good you did,” said my sister with her gap-toothed smile.
She brushed bark and leaves from her head. I shoved my laden backpack into the boot.
“We’d best keep a watch on the fruit, I suppose,” said Meg.
“The wind’ll take care of them,” I lied.
We promised we’d stay another week to visit with her. Between Bonfire Night, the church chutney club, and these storms passing over, we’ll do the job properly this time.
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Feature illustration by Morgan Thomas