The Apricot Tree

The apricot tree stood just outside my grandmother's kitchen window, and by the middle of July it was so heavy with fruit the branches nearly touched the grass. I was eight the first summer she let me climb it. Only the ones that come away easy, she told me. If you have to pull, it isn't ready yet. I have thought about that more times in my life than I could ever count.

We canned for three days straight when the tree came in. She had a big enamel pot, white with a blue rim, chipped on one side, and the kitchen would get so hot we'd prop the screen door open with her father's old flat iron. The radio played in the corner — she liked the afternoon programs — and her hands never stopped moving. Halving, pitting, packing the jars so neatly they looked like something in a shop window. Mine were always a little crooked. She never once corrected them.

What I remember most isn't the work. It's the smell. Apricots simmering with sugar and a little lemon — that warm gold smell that got into the curtains and your hair and stayed for days. To this day I cannot peel an apricot without being right back in that kitchen, eight years old, with sticky fingers and nowhere in the world I would rather be.

She passed the winter I turned nineteen. The house was sold not long after, and I heard from a neighbor that the people who bought it took the tree out to put in a patio. I was angry about that for a long time. It seemed like such a small, careless thing to take from the world.

But here is what they couldn't take. In my own cellar, on a shelf my husband built me, I still keep two of her jars. The fruit is long gone, of course — I emptied them years ago. I just never could bring myself to throw them out. Sometimes when the house is quiet I go down and hold one up to the light, and I can see her standing at that stove, telling me to only take the ones that come away easy.

I think that was the whole lesson, really. Not the canning. The other thing.