Chapter 10 - The Color of Apple Trees
July arrived with the heavy, sweet warmth of high summer in the Hudson Valley.
The apple trees behind the barn had set their fruit—small, hard, green globes that hung in clusters among the leaves, promising five bushels of Northern Spies by the middle of October.
On this Sunday afternoon, the lawn was covered in clover, wild dandelions, and the white petals of falling pear blossoms.
I was sitting on the bottom step of the wrap-around porch, wearing my work shorts and an old grey t-shirt, an oilstone on my knee as I sharpened the blade of an antique hand plane I had found in the barn. Beside me, a cold bottle of beer sat sweating in the shade of the cedar post.
Fifty yards away, near the edge of the reservoir where the cattails grew six feet high, Lily was running.
She wasn't running from anything.
She had her shoes off. Her bare feet kicked through the green grass, kicking up tiny droplets of summer dew, her hair flying behind her in a dark, tangled wave that caught the full, golden glare of the afternoon sun.
She was chasing an old golden retriever we had adopted from the county shelter in May—a twelve-year-old dog named Barnaby who had three working legs, one floppy ear, and an absolute conviction that any child carrying a tennis ball was an angel sent from heaven.
"Barnaby! Drop it!" Lily’s laughter rolled across the grass—loud, bright, uncalibrated, bouncing off the red tin of the barn and echoing down toward the water.
The dog dropped the ball.
Lily didn't snatch it. She threw herself onto the grass on her stomach, her chest hitting the clover, her legs kicking up behind her into the warm summer air. She grabbed the dog around his furry neck, burying her face in his scruff, laughing so hard that her shoulders shook.
She didn't look back at the house.
She didn't check to see if anyone was watching her knees touch the dirt.
She didn't look to see if the grass had left a green smudge on the hem of her white shorts.
I set the oilstone down on the step.
The sun was warm against my shoulders, sinking toward the ridge behind the trees, painting the surface of the reservoir in long, overlapping bands of copper, rose, and gold.
"Dad!" Lily shouted from the grass, sitting up with both hands full of dandelion heads, her face red from the run, her dark hair full of clover blossoms. "Look! Barnaby found a turtle!"
"Don't let him eat it, bug!" I called back, my voice carrying clean and clear across the three acres of open land.
"He's just sniffing it!" she yelled, standing up in a single, spring-loaded motion that showed no stiffness, no hesitation, no memory of pain.
She turned and ran toward the porch, the dog loping beside her, the dandelions flying from her hands like gold confetti in the summer wind.
She reached the bottom step, leaped over the last patch of gravel, and threw herself against my chest with enough momentum to send my beer bottle tipping into the clover.
I caught her.
Her arms went around my neck, tight, warm, smelling of sun-baked grass, dog fur, and the cheap orange popsicles we had eaten after lunch.
I held her against my ribs. Her small heart beat against my collarbone—strong, steady, eighty beats a minute, completely free of the cold arithmetic of the past.
"You've got dirt on your nose, monkey," I whispered into her hair.
May you like
"Good," she said, squeezing my neck until I could barely breathe. "Dirt is the best part."
And above us, the sugar maples leaned into the evening wind, their branches wide, silent, and unbroken, holding the clean blue sky above the water until the stars came out.
