A memory of Apple blossoms...

The old apple trees above the weathered barn had been there a long time.

I had first seen the trees when we bought the farm in the fall. I was enchanted with their leaves, dusty with remnants of summer drought, and the wormy apples polka-dotting the ground with inedible fruit.

I was charmed by their gnarled branches and the cidery smell of those fallen apples, but much less captivated by the drunken yellow jackets filling the air with chronic buzzing.

Over the long, dark winter months the apple trees were mostly forgotten. Occasionally I would notice them, silhouetted against the fire and ice of a northern Ohio winter sunset.

Busy with plowing new gardens and trimming away years of overgrowth, the apple trees waited quietly on their little hill above the barn. Somehow their tender green leaves and blush pink flower buds went almost totally unnoticed.

Until the spring morning when the buds opened.

Oh.

My.

I stepped off the rickety porch and walked across the damp lawn toward their vision of beauty.

Oh.

My.

The trees seemed to glow in the gentle light of a breezy spring morning.

I stood beneath them under the robin egg sky…under clouds so pure and white they looked like heaven.

Tiny snowy petals drifted from the trees and from the clouds.

Drifted around my outstretched arms in an extravagant celebration.

The memory of those apple blossoms is as clear to me now as the feel of this keyboard under my fingers.

If I care to look through my office window I can see a different sky now. Different clouds. Different trees.

But if I care to look into my heart I see those petals…drifting down from heaven…reminding me that beauty experienced will never be truly gone.


This post is linked to Alphabe-Thursday in honor of the letter 'A'. To read other posts, just click here.