Letter No. 19: One Apple

Last spring, Selena was in the process of planting our garden. One day, she added forty tomato plants. I was especially looking forward to all the soups and sauces that would come from them. Everything in the garden looked perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

According to the almanac, we were safely beyond the danger of frost. Winter had released its grip, the days were getting longer, and everything around us seemed to agree that the growing season had begun.

That night, the temperature dropped to eighteen degrees unexpectedly.

Apparently, the frost had not read the almanac.

The garden took the worst of it. Forty tomato plants that had gone into the ground the day before were suddenly gone. Our five apple trees, scattered around the property, were budding too, and I knew the cold had probably reached them.

I just did not know how completely.

As the season progressed, it became clear that those five trees had produced exactly one apple.

We like apples, so losing nearly the entire crop was simply disappointing. And the loss was not entirely ours. Deer move through our property, while raccoons, squirrels, and birds have made their homes in our trees. In a normal year, some of the apples belong to them whether we intend to share or not.

This year, there was almost nothing to share.

Still, one apple remained.

I found myself wondering why.

Maybe that particular blossom opened a little later than the others and missed the worst of the cold. Or maybe it was exposed to the same extreme temperatures and somehow survived.

Timing or resilience.

I do not know.

The more I thought about that, the more interesting the uncertainty became.

We are quick to explain outcomes. Something survives, and we assume strength. Something does not, and we begin looking for what went wrong. We do the same thing with people. We see what happened and start assigning reasons—discipline, perseverance, weakness, character, motive.

Sometimes we may be right.

But sometimes one blossom simply opened later.

The apple gave me an outcome without giving me an explanation.

The frost did something similar. Selena and I had reason to believe it was safe to plant. The almanac said so. The season appeared to say so. And yet eighteen degrees arrived anyway.

Maybe that is part of what formation asks of us: not that we stop making judgments or trying to understand, but that we become a little more patient about our conclusions.

That seems simple when the subject is an apple.

It becomes considerably more complicated when the subject is another person.

Timing matters. Circumstance matters. Resilience matters. Grace matters. And there are parts of another person’s story—their losses, motives, advantages, wounds—that we may never fully see.

The frost touched the garden and the blossoms first, but its effect kept moving. One cold night reached further into the provision than I could have known when the temperature dropped.

And one apple remained.

Maybe it was stronger.

Maybe it was simply late.

I still do not know.

I think I am becoming more comfortable leaving some questions there.

Until next Sunday…

George

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