08 Apr Applesauce
Thursday 9/3
I cross paths with an orchard row on the perimeter of a storage unit/office complex on my 2.5 mile morning walk every day. The trees are pregnant with apples and I often take one to Doug, the neighborhood cow and one to the neighborhood horse. As I walk on the green grass at the beginning of the orchard row, I see a green fruit squashed in the grass.
“What?”
I look up, “Aahhh,” the branches are full of plums! I had no idea that there was a plum tree mixed in with these Apple Trees. I tasted one. Yum!! “Wow, these are way sweeter than normal plums.”
I take one to Grams at the nursing home, they’re not ripe yet. I look them up on Google; they’re called Greengages.
I give one to Mom and Dad. Mom is hesitant.
“Just try it.”
She agrees by taking a small bite. “Wow, they taste better than they look!”
Friday
First there were blackberries. (And even to this day, they have a few berries that are ripe. It’s been months!) Then there were apples. Now there are grapes. All on the 2.5 mile morning walk. Dad and I decided today is the day to pick grapes. We take two boxes and fill them.
“This is amazing!” Dad says.
Saturday
I pick another plum and eat it. “Wow, these are so good. Thank you plum tree!” I take another one with me.
At home, I hand Dad the plum. “What do you think, are they ready?”
“I think one more day.”
“Me too.” We eat it, just the same.
I take a moment and send a mental thought out to the plum tree. “We would like to pick your fruit tomorrow. Prepare your fruit that we may eat your body and your medicine. Prepare your fruits with whatever our soul longs for, our bodies need, and our spirits can imagine. Thank you sweet plums.”
I tell Dad, “We’re going to need a ladder.”
Mom makes applesauce from apples I brough home last week and takes it to Grams. She loves it.
Sunday
I decide I need to walk towards the sun and walk in the opposite direction of the morning loop. I listen to some happy music bouncing and feeling light in step. I come around the corner of the storage unit where the orchard row is.
I see the largest apple tree has fallen. No, I look past her and see. a. massacre.
I scream. Dew and dust on the dead and dying. I fall back a few steps, hit the storage wall with my body and slide down. I scream with my gut, with my ovaries. I scream with my legs. Anger, sadness, grief. I go to the stump. I hold it crying with sloppy tears, screaming with stressed vocal chords.
I feel this death physically – as though the friends pregnant with joy are displayed in front of me in a bloody mess.
An Indian man walks up to me mid-scream. “Stop crying.”
I don’t stop, I cry more, I manage to say “No, these are my friends. I’m so sad.”
“Stop crying. It is making me sad too.”
“I was going to pick these plums. Today.” I mumble as I look around at the chopped up trees, he fades away, and I continue to scream. My heart, this full out well of emotion, is so intense that I have to express it, to stop it would be cutting off a human, natural, and essential process. In the intensity, I feel how good this is, a shift from cutting myself off from myself to a field trip in the practice of being.
He comes back, “Please stop crying. There is nothing you can do.”
I conjure enough energy to say without snot muffling my voice, “You can either leave, or let me cry. I have to express how I am feeling. If I don’t, it will get stuck in my body.”
“Do you need anything? Water?”
“No, thank you. That is very kind of you.” He fades out of my view again and I turn back to the stump, feeling the grooves of the chainsaw, then placing my head on the wood as if the density of the wood can comfort me.
30 or 40 minutes goes by, I’m not sure, but I feel a calmness overcome me, a deep peace. I walk to each trunk, caressing their remains.
“What can I do for you?”
Your grief is felt. We thank you for honoring us with your tears.
You can plant our kind from our seeds.
I hear the birds, so many of them used to sitting in these trees, singing in the distance. Are they sad? Are they angry too?
Said Indian man comes back, water bottle in hand. “Would you like some water?” He moves the water my direction. “You must be thirsty after all that crying.”
“No thank you.” I had already used the leaves to blow my nose.
“When I walked home, I remembered that when I was a child I spent all day crying about a tree that had been cut down at home in India. It’s not right.”
“It’s ignorant.” I say. “In Portland you have to give a posted 30 days’ notice if you want to cut down a tree.”
“In India it is illegal to cut down a fruit baring tree.”
This is a change. He sympathizes. He remembers.
I say “It’s time to go home.” I pick up a few of the plums from the ground. And hand him two. “I live this way.”
“I do too.”
I invite him to our neighborhood book club that is reading the children’s book called “Anti-Racist Baby” by Ibram Kendi. He takes my number and we part.
I get home, Mom and Dad hear me out. I cry some more.
“I’m sorry we didn’t pick them yesterday” Dad says.
“Not me, it was meant to be this way Dad.”
I go back with a bucket and pick up more and more plums. This must be the easiest way to pick plums, no latter needed! I laugh.
They have your medicine. Eat my fruit.
I plop a juicy one into my mouth. I make an altar and kiss the trees.
The tree cutters are not done. The largest apple tree in the front has not been taken away. I hope they see the altar and leave it be. For it is not for them. They are just doing what they are paid to do. But I hope the ones who made the decision to chop down the trees see it and feel, learn, grow, and transcend. Just as this plum tree will lead and do by example.
I don’t feel complete when I come home. I have to move this energy. This needs expression. I want to talk to the owners who decided to do this. How? How do I show them love without anger? How do I show them the impacts of their decision? How do I show them my grief? I pray.
Speak to them as you would yourself. I hear the trees say. I feel their presence, they are comforting me.
I write a note. I pick out the very best plums, wash and towel each one. I’m alone and my mind imagines that this is an attack on everything I love. I feel like my joy is being spit back in my face through a food processor. Add some sugar and I suppose that would be applesauce. Harharhar… What is this reality? Did I create this?
It’s probably nothing personal. The owners probably don’t even know that I enjoy their fruit, they’ve never seen me pick it. They probably have their own reasons.
But that doesn’t change how much this hurts.
I place the cleaned and dried plums in a tub. I pray over it, “May we all be connected to you Mother Earth, may we live in harmony with you and each other. May these be received in love. May your medicine be potent. Amen.”
I thought, what is this medicine? It seems very serendipitous that I would pray for the medicine of these plums and see them cut down the next day. How old were these trees? Decades?
I will give this to the owner or whoever decided to cut down the trees. I place it on the table and spend the day in grief.
Monday
I decide to walk the normal direction and head towards the trees. I get a text message from Nakul, the Indian man, now friend. He says the tree cutters are there.
I walk up to a large truck and two men. They look nervous. I wonder what Nakul told them.
I offer them a plum and say “They are very good.” The first man accepts. “May I ask who asked you to cut these trees down? “
“Ya, sure, I’ll show you.” He goes to the truck cab and comes back with a piece of paper with a bunch of names and addresses on it.
I’m grateful when he points to a name. Brenda Coleson, Eclipse Salon. A woman, I was expecting a man from the American Family Insurance building.
“Thank you. What are you going to do with all this wood?”
“Take it to the dump. You can pick up whatever you like.”
“Ok, Thank you.” I pick out several apples and two pieces of the trunk.
“Apple wood is very good for cooking meat with. You should try it.” Says the second man.
“Thanks.” I hand him a few plums. He eats one right away.
“Wow, those are good.”
“I know.”
These guys are working hard. And they are fast. I appreciate their sweat and efficiency. With a bigger load than I can really handle, I walk away.
“Bye! Thank you.”
After I drop off the wood at the community fire pit, I continue my loop. I find a neighbor is offering some of her veggies.
How lovely!
Some of the pain has decreased. I text Nakul a picture of the veggies. I feel that it’s only fair to share the good alongside the difficult.
Tuesday
It’s a business day. It’s the day I told myself I would talk to the owner. No, not today. I’m not ready.
I grab a plastic bag and start out on my walk going the opposite direction so that picking up any remainder plums would be my final stop.
There are still many plums left! I squat down to pick them.
A black car quickly pulls up and a woman gets out and walks towards me.
“Can I help you?”
“No, not really.”
“What are you doing?”
“Picking plums. Have you had one?” I clean one off and go to hand it to her. I’m still squatting.
“I don’t want one. Were you here yesterday?”
“I’m here everyday. I walk by on my morning walk.”
“There was someone here yesterday who was harassing the people who were here cutting down the trees.”
“Nope, that wasn’t me.” I wonder again, what did Nikul say to them? Funny how that came back around.
“Are you sure?”
“I didn’t yell at them. I talked to them. I’m sad they were cut down.”
“I didn’t say you yelled at them. You told them they were killing the trees.”
“I didn’t say that.” But she isn’t listening. She is talking over me. She made her decision. I am the suspect.
“This is my property. I can do whatever I want with it. You don’t know what I am going to do with the land, or what the trees were doing to my customer’s cars, or if I am going to replant trees here, or what it took to have them here. There are cameras here, so I will be able to tell.”
“Ok, That’s fine. You can look. It wasn’t me. I’m just here picking up plums.”
“I don’t mind you picking up the plums, but this is private property. I can do whatever I want with this property.”
Looking her in the eye, while still squatting on the ground holding a plum I say, “That is a white supremacist idea that the land belongs to one person.”
“That’s it, I’m calling the cops.” She gets out her phone and she’s dialing, not listening. “You need to get off my property right now, get off, you’re calling me a white supremacist.”
“It’s in all of us. It’s not just you. It’s in our DNA, in our policies. The air, water, fire, earth, these are community commodities. We have to re-train ourselves on what it means to be a part of this earth.”
“You need to leave.”
She points to the public street.
“I live here.” I point the other direction.
“No you don’t.”
She starts talking to someone on the phone.
“Someone is here on my private property. And she won’t leave.”
“I will leave.”
“She’s a white female with brown hair and a maroon shirt.”
Wow, I feel profiled, this feels intrusive. I laugh to myself thinking if I told her I am Mexican things would get worst! But my body isn’t laughing. I’m standing now and my legs are shaking.
“I’m here, because I’m grieving the loss of the trees.” I say.
“She says she’s here because she’s grieving the loss of the trees.”
That felt good, hearing her say exactly what I needed her to understand.
“You’d better leave.”
“Ok, I’m leaving.”
I walk towards the back of the ally, the route I go everyday towards my home. I don’t look back. I take the bag of plums and kiss them. Feeling as though in some way, I have honored them. That the hierarchies, the white supremacy, colonialism, the sickness that we all have is being exposed and is beginning to end.
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What does a new world look like when we treat trees as community assets?
Do we all take care of the trees? Do we post our fruit trees on apps like Fallen Fruit so that the community can pick them so that they don’t get messy in the yard? Like Portland, do we have to give a posted notice about wanting to cut down trees so that neighbors can protest or help decide when would be a good time to cut them (like after harvest) or pick up the wood?
How do we live in harmony, knowing that the Earth is sacred?
