I reach for the apples around me. Every tree bowed and heavy with apples. Trees that were strategically planted, over a hundred years ago, by humans long gone. Other trees planted by us, young and flexible with flushes of fruit. They have grown for years with perhaps a blossom here and there, but the fruit is new to them.

I grew up not knowing that there were “good apple years” and “no apple years.” But there always was a red delicious apple in my paper lunch bag. So ubiquitous, it was no more special than the brown paper it came in. I hated red delicious apples. They tasted like chalky, overly sweet potatoes to me. I traded mine or threw them away without a thought. Some anonymous tree, in some anonymous land, picked by some anonymous person who took that apple and waxed it and polished it so it was as perfect as the plastic fruit on my auntie’s dining room table. These apples, the ones all around me, are not those apples.

These trees I have come to understand. In front of our house, the most magnificent of all. An apple tree so full and robust and heavy with apples that she encircles more than half of our screened-in porch. She is the one who scratches along the metal gables of our bedroom on windy nights. She is the one who grows apples, striped light green and pale red, that grow in clusters like grapes. Tens of thousands of apples, and she holds them all. Her trunk is as mighty as an oak’s. Her limbs stretch far and hold strong.

There are other apple trees too. The tree behind our house offers the old-fashioned McIntosh. The one from the time before storage and transportation and the changing desire for sweetness over the delights of complexity. These Macs, my favorite of all apples, are perfection. A crunch so hard, a taste so piquant and sharp, and a juice so explosive they snap you into the now. There is no way to eat these apples mindlessly. They will stop you in your tracks. They will make you look at them while you eat. There is no room for mindless consumption when taste buds meet creation.

We have trees that offer apples you won’t find on store shelves. Small green apples with pink polka dots. Ruddy green apples with rust-colored stripes that, I am certain, are the mothers of Granny Smith, only infinitely more delicious. There are oblong apples and medium-size apples and dark-ruby crabapples. Some are for cider-making. Some for fresh eating or storage. Others are perfect for apple butter, and others shine as preserves. For each apple, a tree that grew it.

For each tree, a different story. Our young trees are simple, their bark smooth. Their limbs can bend in great arches under the weight of their fruit. Some break. Some splinter. Too ambitious in their growth. They’re full throttle, and then they burn themselves out. There is something uncomplicated about a tree like that. I pick her apples with gratitude, but her limbs are sparse.

There are a handful of old apple trees in among the younger ones in our orchard. Over the decades, they’ve had big limbs cut back or broken off. The chickens dust bathe under the shade of one on hot summer days. We had a watering trough under that tree once, years ago. My husband and daughter used to fill it up with icy well water and sit in it and play chess under the tree’s arching canopy on sweltering summer days. They were cooled by the shade of her limbs covered in leaves and baby apples.

I spent Sunday morning inside the world of our most luscious apple tree – the one I already mentioned, Ms. Bountiful and Bodacious. I had to separate her limbs to walk into her. I would take one step in and stop to pluck her apples and drop them in my bushel basket. Then, once I had reached every last apple within my grasp, I would take another step in. In less than three steps, I would have my full bushel and start another. Apples dropped on my head and then onto the ground as a single pluck loosened five more apples from her branches. One of our more playful barn cats, Lucy, came to pounce on the dropped fruit.

The tent caterpillars came a few years ago. She was stripped bare of her plump little buds and newly opening sweet green leaves. They ate everything. And when she was a skeleton, they moved on to neighboring trees. In the forest, even the human ear could hear those caterpillars munching, their poop hitting the forest floor.

She could do nothing but wait for the ravaging to end. And when it did, she took what she had, as did all of her apple siblings, and tried again that very same year. It was either that or enter into winter depleted. A hard winter would be enough to kill her. Her second round of leaflets were puny and shriveled but they gave her enough of the sun’s nourishment to get by. There were no apples that next year or the one after that. She needed everything she could muster just to survive.

She is an old tree, but she is full. Life has given her a choice spot to live. Her roots are nourished by nutrients that another apple tree, further down in the corner of the yard, cannot reach. That tree had to grow tall and thin to live within the dense trees surrounding her. I need a ladder to pluck the few apples she can grow.

But it’s another tree in our backyard, the one framed by the big picture window in our living room, that calls to my heart now.

She’s a quiet, unassuming tree, maybe even a bit ugly. A craggy apple tree. People before us cut off limbs that died when she was no longer able to supply her sap to their tips. We, too, have taken out our saw and cut back lifeless limbs that threatened to splinter what’s left of her. It’s only served to exaggerate her odd shape. One long limb branching from a trunk full of scars. There was life there, behind those scars, once. She throws up vertical branches every year, an attempt to increase her leaves to absorb the life of the sun, but it’s not enough. There are too few leaves. There are too few branches and limbs. Life is dwindling for her.

She is everything Ms. Bountiful and Bodacious is not. A ladder under her two main branches and a little shake and her tiny apples all succumb to gravity. Her apples are small, but they are layered and sweet and tart and zesty and they remind you that an apple is not just an apple, and that nature is a marvel.

In this time of waning life, who would blame this tree if she simply decided to stop offering apples? Having given over a hundred years of apples to thousands of creatures, wouldn’t we all agree on the fairness of her preserving what’s left? “Forget the apples, old girl, just take care of yourself!” But she continues to blossom year after year. She continues to grow her wondrous little apples. The new generations of deer that come here every fall, the shy mothers showing their fawns all of the choice apple trees on the land just as their mothers showed them, go to her first. They will eat every last ground apple before moving on to another tree. Last year I watched as a plump doe stood on her rear legs and stretched herself to pluck apples off the tree’s branches with her mouth. Maybe the old tree does it for them.

She will die soon, the last of her energy devoted to life beyond her own. She will give it all away, every last drop of her for a seed. She teaches me, and I am a witness to her devotion. There is joy and abundance in the perfection of her apple tree counterparts, but she is wisdom and selfless determination. She, like all the other trees, like all forms of life that live and serve, will one day be absorbed fully back into the fold. The trunk that remains will crumble and feed the universes that live among her roots.

Life depends on her, even when she can no longer offer the plump and the shiny. The deer still come. The goldfinches still land. The human still picks her fruit. And she still endures. She offers everything she has, until the last drop of life courses through her and she is nothing more than a skeleton of wood.

I don’t want courses or gurus or weekend retreats to fix me. I want old apple trees anointed by the touch of God. Trees that wrap themselves around me and trees that gasp the last of their life force into a lovely little apple, round and perfect, that I may eat.

Adapted from Tara Couture’s book Radiance of the Ordinary (Chelsea Green, September 2025) and printed with permission from the publisher.