Granny Smith's Broken Ring

I've been sleeping better now. Sleeping too much. In the daytime I sleep until the trees out of my window catch my eye. The trees have claws now, in this winter. I am waiting for the claws to hide themselves in a mask of leaves and buds. The apple trees are what I see. Their fruit was frozen two years ago. A late freeze took the trees' babies. Not one apple to be plucked, not one Macantosh fallen to the ground. The blossoms were there, but the March winds jumped into April and crushed each flowers' little heart. The fruit didn't grow it just stopped. I missed the pies, the jellies, the apple baseball. Petals were all that fell. I think that the petals were the trees' tears. Between the two rows of trees in the short alley, a white blush cobbled the ground. A pathway to something invisible. A short stretch of highway that led to nothing and started with nothing. Maybe the path didn't end. Maybe it changed its direction. Maybe it went up, and the white blush blended into the clouds. All of the apple babies quietly launched themselves up to heaven, and danced in the sky for a while until they were so sleepy that they sunk into the heavy bottoms of clouds. The babies hid themselves in raindrops and fell back to the earth. The mother trees drank from the earth and the babies swam back into their mothers' bark creating a new pattern in her rings. They swam around and around plumping up and strengthening the ring, a ring that would never be broken the way that the ring from last year had. A new year marked with a renewal. The next year there was no freeze, the babies grew, there were so many apples. You were in my belly then Frost, just beginning to grow. This is the next year, so soon it has arrived. If you are like the apple babies, maybe you will come back to me.
Night, night Frost
mama loves you.