FRUIT Indulgence / Shine Eileen Oldag

Eileen Oldag

The crop made good. Apples overabundant were stored in every box and bin last of them in the barrel of old wood and cracks, unlidded by the back door. By morning the coon had helped himself beyond capacity. He lay backside down, half-buried in the cores and discards furred belly bloated upward his eyes too teary for plea or apology. Mmmm. I remembered

such pure indulgence. Up the mountain ignoring the snow we’d come for as well as food or fire our intentions discarded by the bed in the pile of boots and wool the white sheets and feathered comfort an igloo against the cabin’s cold. It was a minute. It was an hourless day. You could hear the snow fall. I could see your thoughts. It was too much. It was not enough. We turned away. We turned back toward.

So I turned the barrel over its unprepared slats popping in complaint. I sent the coon suffering its way back to the woods sorted out the spilled apples found a fine one still cool, its smooth skin tight

and I bit.

Eileen Oldag

You returned home sweetly, tartly delighted, having parked your truck under a neighbor’s apple tree to let our children climb up the cab and then, defying conventional wisdom, stretch for the highhanging fruit— the take was more than your modest expectation. You put a fruit to your summer sleeve, polishing the apple and the apple pickers.

There is much you could tell them—

Keep good manners, clean clothes, clean words, clean hands. Don’t take hot, running water for granted. Read. Memorize Desiderata even if others don’t. Work. Play. Be honest in both. Stay plumb, even as the world around lists. Be kind to every living being. Never wage war. Don’t even wage anger. Forgive everyone! Life is a wheel and this family the keyway. We turn, one with the other. At times, we turned our backs on the better. Forgive us! Repair us. Make friends, honest and kind. Make one friend to keep for the decades ahead, the one to call on the day we are unreturned.

But today—

you returned home sweetly, crisply delighted because in the shade of a tree and the buff of an apple there was nothing to tell that they could not see— the alchemy of ripening the reward of reach their own shine, awaiting.

Anita Tanner

Their rowdy heads perch like apples above an oval bowl, the flow of laughter splashing from white porcelain nest where these small sparrows lodge like altarpieces after feeding on finger food: nuts, grains, seeds—small things.

I drop to my knees to scrub the smell and flavor of earth from hair, nails, ears and to savor the saltiness of rambunctious sunlight oiling their skin— memories of earth, salt, and mustard seed

turned to blood within them, their voices rising in the moisture that collects on mirror and tile like warmed yeast. Here and now a kingdom. Reluctant, they emerge, their withered fingertips flesh out like miracles, miniscule loaves of leavened bread.