Writers in the Attic: Apple

INTRODUCTION At the end of the second grade my family moved from Kailua, Oahu to Idaho Falls, Idaho where we lived for a year and a half. The house we rented for the first three months was huge and haunted—white wooden siding, green linoleum floors, dingy beveled-glass doors leading from one echoey room to another. The house sat on an acre of land, squat between an overgrown apple orchard on one side and train tracks on the other. At night, while we slept, the train roared past, rattling the glass doors for what seemed like hours. Some mornings, droplets of water slid down the mirror over the fireplace in the living room. I slept on a mattress on the floor of the dining room with my younger siblings tucked in beside me. We held onto the dining table legs when the trains passed. We believed if we weren’t gripping tight enough, we’d end up carried out the windows by the force of the whooshing cars.

It was our first summer away from the ocean. I remember sitting under the apple trees, waiting for the trade winds, hoping for an apple to bloom from the branches above me and fall into my hands. But an apple never dropped. I don’t think any grew, either. My parents didn’t know how to live in a place like Idaho, let alone in a sprawling house in the middle of an apple orchard, so far away from their old life with all of its humid familiarity. Pruning the apple trees and spraying for aphids and mites with the hope of those trees bearing fruit was not something they thought about. Those apple trees were last on their list of things to take care of—there was too much work, and too many kids, and even less money to be able to do anything extra. But I loved those apple trees. I loved the possibility of those apple trees. I was from ocean and mountain, from sweet lychee fruit and mangos, their skin pierced with 1