If I had known- when I was six or seven- that climbing the apple tree out in the back orchard after school would later save my life, I don't think I could have understood the gravity of it all. When you are six or seven, sitting in your father's apple tree with your skinny legs dangling over the fruitful limbs that early fall brings, you don't think that you will come back to this place in your adulthood as a refuge when the pain gets intolerable. As you bite into that delightful apple with only simple worries in your growing mind - spelling tests, being caption of the kickball team, avoiding vegetables at dinnertime- you don't know that years later, when you are cycling downward into a spiral of deteriorating health in a hospital room, that you will come back to this perfect moment. I go there, he told me, over and over again. Those apple trees on my father's farm just might save my life. From my front porch where my son parks my wheelchair, I can still see them across the yard and they are glorious.
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