Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home. . .  You can stitch it on a sampler and bake it in a pie.  What kind of pie are you imagining? Apple? Are apples quintessentially 'American'?  I imagined the shiny, often categorized as forbidden, fruit a different kind of contraband.  The fruit would have migrated, tucked in a bundle and carried north until reaching places where seeds put down roots.  Over this new ‘home,’ the bundle became a blanket encompassing the apple under our expansive, yet exclusionary, identity of "American".  The closest I came to migration was ten years in Guatemala.  As years passed, I missed fewer and fewer aspects of home, but a few comforts paled to memory  Water from the tap.  Chocolate.  Cheese. 

Apples. 

Guatemala is called the land of the eternal spring because fruit is always in season.  I had never tried many of these fruits before living in a tropical climate, much less had the luxury of fresh fruit laden markets down the street.  Upon returning, I would never taste the same vibrance of flavor nor fresh texture in a Wisconsin supermarket, and not as reasonably priced.  I also ate apples in Guatemala.  My friend who ran the local comedor often had an apple in her hand, but they were small, mealy, not quite flavorful and just generally disappointing.  At Christmas time, apples were passable in ponche, a warm cidery punch.  The rest of the year, I would treat myself by purchasing the imported varieties. 

What was missing?  Was I accustomed to the 'American' apple?  What did that mean if all great fruits were borrowed?  Were they just a parallel problem of access and freshness?  Like the tropical fruits in Wisconsin, these apples paled against apples plucked from my dad’s orchard outside our door.

At the time, my preference for the shiny, store bought Granny Smith or Red Delicious felt a betrayal of my newly developed sense of conscious for indigenous identity.  I didn’t know where apples called home.  Were my discarded seeds accidental tourists or were they the start of trees whose roots finally found their way home? 

Home Sweet Home.

Fast forward almost ten years since my last Guatemalan apple. 

"It's the best year.  I might never see another year like this.  They're impeccable.  Perfect.  I stare at them.  I wish I had a picture."

"We could, you know, actually take a picture."

He has ten, no twelve, maybe thirteen varieties. . . I think.  I can't remember.  Much less remember, their names, at least not all. . .

Wealthy.  Macintosh.  Cortland.  Prairie Magic.  Freedom.  Zestair.  Honey Crisp.

He knows their names.  He knows their reasons for existing.  He shares histories with his apple varieties, or at least, stories with his apple trees.

Bushel baskets, plastic bags, dehydrator shelves, canning jars, bowls on kitchen countertops and refrigerator drawers.  If there ever was a year to revisit my questions about apples, this was the one.

To whom or where did the apple 'belong'? 

At my desk, I balanced my daily apple in my left hand and pecked at the keyboard with my right.  I Googled, "history of apples in Central and South America."  I didn't find much, except what I found was exactly the reason for the disconnect.  Apples were originally from Asia.  They traveled through Europe and finally to Central and South America with Spaniards.  I had imagined an identity for apples that was not their own. 

I pieced together other articles.  Sometimes apples fit in with their surroundings, grew and flourished.  Others might were left unattended to fend for themselves.  Some were centered and celebrated. 

I sucked on the juice that dripped down my finger and pulled a final bit of flesh with my teeth.  I placed the apple core into my empty coffee thermos.  I did not throw my apple cores in the garbage at work.  Some of that choice was environmentally driven.  It didn't make sense for me to put organic material inside a plastic bag that would not decompose.  That was an unfair fate for any piece of nature.  A larger motivation was that somewhere in my own flesh, I believed that the apple, my dad's apple, had been connected and cared for.  The seeds deserved to return to their origin in his orchard.

It had been unfair to compare standards of apples, much less those in a diaspora.  Finding a home was never guaranteed.  Sweetness was relative and dependent on the generation.  Still, once chosen, home was always home.