My chicken-filled backyard in Bozeman, Mont., butts up against a square block of condominiums. The green fence between us is like a Berlin wall, separating noisy, itinerant college kids from our more stable neighborhood of families. It separates the mostly paved, over-parked, garbage-strewn and under-aged drinking zone that police call “Bourbon Street” from our homes. Every year or two, we neighbors — a loose weave of Democrats, Republicans, grandmothers, cancer survivors and physicists — attend city meetings to try to keep these condos, known as “in-fill,” from moving onto our street. So far we have succeeded.
It is true that the three-story condos make an excellent windbreak during the wildest winter storms, and every morning I walk my dog, Ricky, through them, without much concern for where he poops. Ricky and I stroll over speed bumps and parking lots, where cars go slow and we’re relatively safe, and past a beautiful little apple tree on a polka dot of lawn. This year, as Montana summer rushed to a close, I watched a profusion of tiny red fruit bend the tree’s branches. It wasn’t a crab apple. I tasted one, just to make sure. It was tart but not puckeringly so.
I am a great fan of fresh apple cider, and Bozeman has a small commercial press on the edge of town. But my house has only the immature trees I’ve planted myself. As chill winds swirled in and early snow was forecast, I watched those beautiful apples fall, crushed on the driveway, rotting into the miniature lawn.
At last I couldn’t stand it and asked the condo-owner if she wanted help with her apples. She was relieved. “Take them all!” she cried. Then she mentioned another place she was selling that had two good trees, and said I could have those, too.
After shaking the dickens out of the condo tree, and gathering a trunk full of apples, I headed to the other place. Snowflakes were just spitting when I arrived and a young couple was already there picking. The trees were dwarfs, with large, beautiful pie apples. I introduced myself, said that Kate had given me permission to pick here. “I think she gave a lot of people permission,” the man replied. “That front tree was picked clean when we got here.”
Yes, the tree was empty, but the ground was still thick with apples. “That’s funny,” I said. “I always thought part of the deal was to clean up the rotten ones, too.”
The man shrugged. As they dieseled away in their super-sized rig, I picked a grocery-bag of baking apples from the back tree and seven cider-worthy bags from the apples left to rot on the ground. I worked quickly as snow began falling in earnest, thinking that apple picking is like heating with wood. It warms you twice — once when you pick, once when you drink the hot cider.
But whatever made me assume that I — or any other gleaner — had to take all the rotten ones? Of course they are useful for a hen-pecked compost pile like mine, but was it some old country courtesy that I harkened to?
I remembered the small orchard at my grandparents’ place. Although some refer to them as “yard apples,” my grandparents knew the variety of each tree and the best use for its fruit. In late summer, we picked bucket after bucket of multi-colored apples, with varieties specific for sauce, baking and eating, with the leftovers for cider. Uncle Bill was the only one who could winkle the antique machine into peeling and coring them. We always cleared the fallen apples from the ground, feeding the rotted ones to the cows.
But now, as I grabbed the last handfuls of snowy, sticky fruit, I remembered Grandpa showing me where an insect had stung an apple and laid its eggs. “We can’t eat these,” he said as the Holsteins drooled along the fence-line. “But if we just leave them on the ground we’ll have more bugs every year.” So this was really all about the health of the trees. For the future.
But whether it was ingrained courtesy or true gratitude that drove me to drop off a jug of cider for the condo-owner, Kate, I now feel a finger-hold of human connection to the wasteland of condos to my west. In our neighborhood, connection is our future, and maybe it happens one apple at a time.
Joanne Wilke is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She writes in Bozeman, Montana.
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