September 2024

The girl was in the middle of a thousand tasks, and I was in the middle of myself. Had seen a  hundredsome Septembers, and was ready to watch a hundred more before following the sugar maple leaves to lie down in the field. 

And then the river came up. 

Closer than I’ve ever seen it. Walking up the banks and across the lawn in the dark of the night, so that in the morning, when the wind was trying to shake me down and the mountain stretched and shed itself like a large and waking reptile, the water was already at the door. 

The girl had run two days before, abandoning her laundry in the wash and her dishes in the sink and her tea on the desk. She stopped at the front door with her rush packed bag, unsure which well had cracked and sprung this leak of panic in her, and said I’ll be back. 

There were two tomatoes and the last summer mango on the table, still waiting to get ripe. A jar of her mothers salt. A bottle of her father’s rum. She promised to come back for them in a day, maybe two at the most. 

But the rain was already starting. And she had to get up the mountain. Both of us heard her try and fail to tell the truth.

I’ve watched the river from this distance for a century. Before they paved the roads to town. Before they planted the boxwoods on the drive and the big oaks on the property line. Before the Wrights started planting the far field, and raised sons who raised sons, all tall as their corn, now gray-haired and sitting sentry over flooded fields from the front porch rocking chair. 

I remember when all of this was small, and the man who laid me, brick by mortar into being, started growing apples. I watched my namesake, like a child, grow up and awkward and old. Again and again. And then I watched the river take them. 

I’ve heard the girl talk about baptism. About going down to the river and coming out clean, all while trailing mud on my floors. Maybe, if I was a moveable thing, I would have walked down with her, washed my face, my hair, I would have met the river in a kinder way. 

That’s not what I was built for though. I was built to hold my ground and I did. The river came in through the dutchdoor. Ripped her clean from the hinges. Blocked the exits. Threw the woodstove up the stairs. Overturned the fridge. Swept the mugs from their shelves. Made off with the candlesticks. Outside, the cedars leaned close, arms out in protection as cars and boulders and pieces of the highway were taken up in an unwilling stampede. 

It took the boxwoods. And the old oak. And the powerlines. It flooded the well, flipped the gas tank. It tried to take the bridge, cracked the concrete and ripped off the south walls. It took every home from the riverbend, gone like they were never there. The poplars, the beech tree, the buck-eye, and the birch. It took the weeping cherry. My boxwoods. 

Then it leaves. Recedes. Crawls back down the banks, repentant, unclean, trailing mud on my floors. 

After is quiet. Wondering if the world is over quiet. Waiting for the search parties, and the still-alive fires, and for the girl to cut her way down the mountain and keep her promise. 

X,

the apple house