#68 A WOMAN'S BRIEFS: DAY TEN -- AN APPLE FROM GERMANY

This is the tenth day since I confessed to not feeling like writing, deciding instead to write by discipline. For nine days, and now this one, I have pulled things from my writings between 1970-1990s bound together in a collection called Moon Snail Shells and Other Broken Things.

 As the ten days passed, I considered, then didn’t share, my poem about a lecherous man at Central Train Station in Antwerp, about my favorite high school history teacher, Mr. Cognac, about watching a pelican that pierces rolling salt water to pluck and pocket dawn’s delicacies, and an essay about being a mom. I do adore my children.

Here’s a little thought I nearly shared on Day Seven, but didn’t. I wrote in 1975, and I have no memory of why. When I came across it again this morning while I was choosing the essay about an apple, it felt important to remember.  Here then, a short observation before a short essay about an apple.

A SNACK THOUGHT — 1975

          PINK-KA-PINNKKK!

Not unlike popcorn,

The voice of a mob

Begins with

One

Hot

Kernel.

~~~

 Sometimes, the unexpected is what a day needs . . . especially if the unexpected pleases us, as this 1979 occasion pleased me.

Friday, August 31, 1979.   Today I ate an apple from Germany. Western Germany, near Stuttgart, where David took possession of a lovely car. The apple had fallen from a tree. Whose tree? I will probably never know. The apple had one good bruise left from the fall, and I ate around it. Then, I ate even that, honoring its long trek to my house, and its tart, crisp flavor.

 Is it not unusual to have an apple delivered fresh from German soil? I’m sure it is. Shiploads may well be delivered the world over, but one, solitary, tart apple from beneath the tree? Unusual. And it happened to me because David is who he is, a man who thinks of such things. He picks up an apple, a leaf, a shell, an oddly shaped twig anywhere in the world, and brings it home because he knows his wife prefers such things to designer-labeled scarves, and because he is inclined to surprises rather than shopping malls.

 How could I not savor the occasion, not notice the uniqueness, not praise the unexpected ways of life?

            My schedule hasn’t changed

                        My children still are who they are

                                    I have tasks undone

                                                Floors to sweep

But today I took time to sketch an apple from a tree in a yard in Germany, and then I ate it. All of it.