Mother's Day

On the shuttle back to the airport parking lot the other day, a man got on with a box with a handle like travellers from Maine use to carry lobsters, but this one said "Caramel Apples."  Someone said a caramel apple would hit the spot on the way back to the car, and someone else asked if he'd brought enough for everyone.  He didn't say anything; he had earbuds in his ears, and I think he missed the whole exchange. 

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate came back from somewhere with a caramel apple for me.  After the apple was eaten, I planted one of the seeds from it in a cutoff milk carton and put it in the window of my dormitory room.  The seed did germinate and I think for the rest of the year I had it in my dorm room, a bit of green in a room on the sixth floor of a twelve-story building with windows that didn't open.

At some point I took it home with me, to my parents' house, and my dad planted it in the alley.  The standing joke of course was that if it did ever make apples, we'd have an awful time keeping the insects off the caramel.  It did make a few apples over the years but they weren't very good and they didn't have caramel on them. 

The tree eventually died; by the time I sold the house, it was gone.

Last winter, a neighborhood group raising money for the new park at Highland and St. Charles had a plant sale, and I bought a Granny Smith apple tree, along with some blueberry bushes and strawberries.  My only prior experience with apple trees was not that successful (see above), and I didn't get off to too good a start with the new one, leaving the bareroot tree out of the ground for a while before I got it planted.  But I did get it in the ground eventually, and it made leaves in the spring, grew a little in the summer, and dropped the leaves in the fall.  It's 3 or 4 feet tall and years away from making apples, caramel or not.  But as the winter days drag on, something to look forward to, waiting for the leaves to emerge on the little tree, seeing it grow.  Someday, if all goes well, there will be apples; planting trees definitely requires a longterm view.

Then last year on Mother's Day, we were all working in the backyard, getting kudzu off the back fence and doing some general clean up.  There used to be two dogwood trees in the backyard, but they both died - blight or drought or old age or some combination of the above, I guess.  At some point that afternoon I told Tom I knew what I wanted for Mother's Day, that I wanted a dogwood tree.  (I could have told my children this, given that they were technically the ones responsible, but going straight to Tom was more efficient.)  So he went to Pike's and got one, and the kids dug a hole and we planted it, near where the other dogwood trees had been, on the other side of the yard from the apple tree.

Sarah said it should be our Mother's Day tradition, to take a picture of the dogwood tree every year.  I thought that was a great idea but of course we didn't get around to doing it.  Maybe this year.