Many apples. Many fat apples. I go outside often to stare at my apples, to bask and revel in their fullness and fatness, the sense of plenty.
It’s years since I’ve had apples. Though I have several trees, all which I planted, only the possums have profited. Possums have laid waste to my crops.
Right now, at least, I have them on the back paw. (Yes, yes, I am aware of the folly of hope. On my lips, as on yours, are the words of Horace: naturam furca expellas tamen usque recurret. But no man lives with no delusions. Let this be mine for now, that I am winning the Possumic War.)
Nevertheless, I have shrouded the best of the trees in $80 worth of netting to protect its maybe $50 worth of apples. Yet though I seem to count the cost, I do not count the cost, because it is impossible to price the sheer and fertile pleasure of rising from my desk and stepping through the door on to the patch of land I choose to call my own and gloating over my netted crop, my globular mob of apples, my fleshy baubles.
Oh, the weight of them. ‘‘To bend with apples the mossed cottage trees,’’ wrote Keats 200 years ago. My house is no cottage, my trees bear no moss, but boy have I got bend.
Six months ago those now-bent branches were as bare as rock. But then in August and September, from out of the bark there peeped the tiny tongues of green, the tongues that said the earth had turned again and spring would come.
And when it came it came with rain and wind and blossoms, papery, pinkish, vulnerable blossoms. And somehow in the rain and wind the bees found out the blossoms and they groped and fumbled them.
And from the groping and the fumblings grew little pendant applelets, the size of cherries. And as they swelled and as the weather warmed they thinned themselves to two or three a bunch. And they were green, and hard as little stones, but they were sucking in the radiant photons of the warming sun.
And now they hang perhaps a month from sweetness and in the darkening colours of their skin there is a summer captured and a mirror of the world. In my apples are all things and all things are in my apples.
Consider the apple. It is the first fruit. Was it not an apple that Eve the temptress plucked and ate and gave to Adam to eat, and that sticks to this day in man’s throat and is responsible for his misery?
No, it was not. Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which was a mouthful then and now, but there’s no mention in the Bible of an apple.
Yet it’s no surprise we think it was an apple. For the apple is the fundamental fruit, the fruit that’s in the supermarket all year round, and if it weren’t we’d know the game was up and Armageddon loomed.
No fruit is as common in our language as the apple. An apple is the fruit you give to teacher. An apple every day is said to fend away the doctor. The one you love and cherish is the apple of your eye.
An apple fits so neatly in the human hand, somewhere between a tennis and a cricket ball, but with a dint in either end for ease of holding by a thumb and forefinger in famous opposition. The apple’s flesh, like ours, wears a protective skin, but that skin yields like butter to our teeth.
And when the eating’s done the apple core’s a missile that just begs to fly towards the rubbish bin and skid across the floor, or else to find a home beneath some roadside hedge, where pips may germinate and round we go again.
Each apple is the last six months made edible. Each apple is a fraction of a dying star. Each apple is the story of creation. I have apples.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
