Apple tree leaves beautiful memories
We inherited her from Maisie Sheahen who lived in the thatched cottage for many years, before going to heaven in her time and season and leaving a trove of warm memories behind her through the whole parish.
Somehow, in a surreal kind of way, I feel that Maisie will never truly be gone from this earth for as long as the big strong tree whispers with the breezes that blow.
My eldest son, Cuan, gave us a special gift when we took over the cottage nearly 15 years ago now. It was a stone plaque for the front wall beside the gate. It reads simply, Maisie’s.
That is the truth of it. The cottage will always be known locally as Maisie’s. It will never ever be Cormac’s. I like that, a lot.
The admirable Irish Seed Savers project over in East Clare, at Scariff, has a unique commercial orchard which boasts old native apple trees from every county in the country. You can go there and buy a genuine Roscommon sapling for your Castlerea garden, or a Cork tree, or a Wexford or Mayo variety, or anywhere else.
Many people do that, but it will be a long time, if ever, before any of those trees achieve the lichened girth and stature and serenity of Maisie’s Beauty.
The iconic reality of the old queen was hallmarked for me during the heatwave when a visiting girl child could not resist climbing up into the branches, before I could stop her.
She went up as fluently and smoothly as either of our two cats, and was photographed up in the branching fork against a background of glossy leaves and baby apples ripening redly in the sun.
Somebody told me during the heatwave that an old apple tree has to draw at least 30 gallons of water daily from the earth in order to survive.
I don’t know the answer to that one, but what I do know is that this year’s crop is the heaviest and sweetest of the past decade. A regiment of soldiers would not be able to consume all the red-cheeked plump apples falling daily. Old Maisie must be smiling the smile she used to smile, I’m told, when neighbours came in the evenings at this time of year to gently allegedly ‘rob’ her orchard. They had her full permission, as they still have ours, but it is much more fun to believe you are really robbing the fruit.
An old apple tree is maybe one of the most colourful mirrors that nature uses to illustrate the passage of the Irish seasons.
In the dark pit of winter, when the gales blow and the scudding moon is scourged by black-fanged clouds, you can hear the old beauty groaning under the strain, as her spindly top branches flail helplessly against the wind and hail. Then, as time passes, as it does, the tree somehow overnight dons an Easter bonnet and shawl formed by delicate lilac blossoms, a whole filagree of growth, and, before you know it, there is not a bare twig in sight, but the greening canopy of the promise of another summer of sunshine and ease and life and hope.
And the moss and lichen on the trunk are warm to the touch as the old lady whispers. I am not a sentimental man, nor a spiritual one, but at such times, I know well that the old Maisie that we never met, but about whom we have heard a thousand warm stories of praise, is somehow not far away but very close to her old house in another dimension.
The calendar summer is over. We approach the harvest. The fruit surrenders every evening to its red weight and ripeness, and falls to earth. The windfalls make a unique sound which is neither a thud nor a thump, or any of the sounds for which there are dictionary definitions. Maybe I can coin a sound-word for what I hear now every evening. It is “thrumpa” or something very like that.
A surrender sound of the arrival of another harvest, as the swallows that will depart from us soon now fly lower and lower in the shortening evenings, and the schoolbooks for the upcoming generation are bought and bagged. And the first of the leaves begins to yellow and fall. And in the nights, the first chills of late August and early September.
Maisie was dead and buried for a couple of years before we inherited her apple tree, garden and cottage. The minute we came in the front door we caught a certain special atmosphere of peace and craic which she left behind her.
I am not being maudlin here, merely factual. There are still strands and vestiges of that beneath her roof and around the place but strongest, we feel, under the whispering widespread arms of the beautiful tree she left behind her, that is giving its fruit back to the earth these days and nights of the new autumn.
“Thrumpa... thrumpa... thrumpa”.
