The past few weeks I’ve been dealing with our apple crop. You wouldn’t think a humble house in the suburbs would also be a burgeoning apple orchard, but my wife has vision.
“I’ll just plant a few trees,” she said.
At first, I was only annoyed because the trees messed up the mowing pattern. If there’s one thing a suburban guy wants to have figured out and optimized, it’s the mowing pattern for the lawn. Add a new feature to the yard and suddenly the geometry is thrown off. Could be weeks before you reach optimal mowing pattern again.
Plant three apple trees and it’s pandemonium until either you, or those goddam trees, die.
For the past ten years it’s mostly been about the sprawling limbs reaching farther and farther across the lawn. I’d gotten very good at squatting low, walking like a duck, basically, to get under those limbs while pushing the mower past the trees.
There have only been a couple of years with apples, and usually just a dozen or so of the fruit reached maturity.
This year, however, the largest tree had a bumper crop. Hundreds of apples weighing down the lower branches all the way to the ground.
“Good for you,” someone might say. “Now you have free apples!”
Except they’re misshapen and splotchy. These apples look like Mother Nature’s first draft of “apples,” back when she had no idea what an apple should look like. These apples are to normal apples are what naked mole rats are to normal rats. If these apples were dogs, they’d be the Chinese Crested.
In a word, they’re inedible.
I’m on my third week of picking up apples from the lawn. It’s a chore I dislike thoroughly, but most of all because, if I leave them on the ground too long, they soften and rot, drawing wasps and hornets to feed off the fermented flesh.
At the moment, I’ve got the lawn mostly picked up, but now I’m not sure what to do with all the apples. I hate to trash them because I’ll be tormented with the thought of contributing to global warming by the methane generated by the apples buried in a landfill. Neither do I want to leave them on the wild side of our yard because we already have a tick problem, and attracting fresh critters will likely bring more of the little blood suckers along for the ride.
On top of all these first world problems, the most troubling is that I find myself in late middle-age to have assigned myself the chores I hated the most when I was a kid.
In our tiny, tract-home yard on Cleveland’s west side, my father jammed an apple tree and three plum trees out back. My brothers and I took turns picking up the fallen fruit. Between the fruit and the dog poop, I spent many an hour bent over, scouring the yard. Mind you, I didn’t take pride in my work; I was simply afraid of my father’s wrath if we left too much on the ground.
I vowed I would one day have a place of my own and then I wouldn’t have to do such stupid chores. But here I am, master of my domain, but also the guy who picks up nasty stuff from the back yard just to make mowing simpler.
I really don’t have time to lament more than this about the apples and dog poop, as they are my chores of summer and time grinds on. The leaves are starting to fall from the trees, and we have a lot of trees. Cherry and maple and box elm, along with the apple trees.
Now fallen leaves and hidden dog poop are my chores of autumn.
It’s a big deal and takes an inordinate amount of my time to keep up. Yes, I know that some experts advise just leaving the leaves on the ground. They’re called “leaves,” for Christ sake; just LEAVE THEM. That’s all well and good but the trapped moisture kills the lawn, leaving mostly dirt behind. Also dog poop.
“That’s the best part,” the expert may proclaim. “That dirt is nutrient rich and strengthens the trees and local bio-community of insects, which leads to bird activity, and soon you’ve got a regular little forest.”
I might be swayed if I didn’t have dogs blasting across that diminished lawn, turning dirt into poopy-mud, and tracking it all over the place. Even with my best effort, mud season starts about now and runs until April, when finally the lawn has a resurgence.
To deal with my dogs’ muddy paws, I’ve gotten one of those cups with tentacles on the inside to clean them. You fill the cup with water and jam the paw into the cup repeatedly, mimicking, I’m told, a sex act.
Trust me, the dog doesn’t enjoy it any more than I do.
All of this is to say that I really enjoy writing made-up stories. It’s time spent with imaginary friends in a world of my own invention, considered while I sit in a comfortable chair with a warm drink. I don’t have to rake leaves, and I don’t pick up dog poop, and I don’t deal with rotten apples.
There are many motivations for writing a novel; one of mine is that it postpones when I must stick a dog’s paw in a tentacle-lined cup of dirty water and pump it in and out.
Another is that I just enjoy writing.
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
I’m figuring out how to write this next novel. I think I said this last time, but each one is its own thing requiring a certain something that you can’t quite pin down until you get through a draft.
For me, the first draft is slow and painful. There will be moments of clarity where the words flow. Hopefully, one of those moments hits soon.
Maybe You’d Like
This week, I’ve joined a group promo called: The Pre-Halloween Giveaway
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/YtGLgee
Next Picayune
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune. I’ll be back in two weeks with more stories, book news, and tips for autumnal yard chores!
All the best and thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune.
—mickey
P.S. Order my book!