On Apple Trees and Romance
Faye Srala
Apple trees look the best in spring, when white blossoms beckon bees and loose pale petals floating on whispers of breeze starkly contrast with the jade grass where they fall. My apple trees are many years overgrown and have thousands of blossoms. I love standing between the branches and feeling the buzz of springtime.
Nathan and I met over the winter, and by the spring we were an item. A new budding romance bloomed with the nascent fruit. It was a raucous Thursday night at a local hangout; football cheers and jeers dominated the air. Nathan and his friend took the last seats at the table where I sat with my friend. He was young and fun, and based on his build, probably well hung. He talked about Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas. Leonard Cohen and the Coen Brothers. He liked to cook and kayak. He found the homeless to have fascinating life stories full of an innocence left behind by most of us years ago. He said their fall from society was misunderstood and they deserved respect. But, honestly, he had me at Bob Dylan.
Once all the petals drop, immature apples emerge, but they grow fast. In a couple of months, perfect little green apples dot the branches, filled with the promise of the sweet fruit that they will become. Now is the time to start dreaming of cider, pie, and apples baked with butter and savory autumn spices. Nathan and I walked the greenbelt, stayed up later than we should have, fed each other fruit in bed, and fell asleep watching movies. We fled town when we could, for camping weekends or to small quirky towns neither of us had visited. He asked where I hadn’t been yet, but wanted to go. DC was my answer. He made all the plans for later in the fall. Long talks and comfortable silences filled our days. He’d ask me what I was thinking during moments of quiet, germinating seeds of mental intimacy to root along with our physical appetites. It felt like unseen forces propelled us together, keeping us entwined.
Gravity is an attractive force that all objects have for each other. Apples succumb to gravity in mid-summer. Trees know which of their offspring are not strong enough to make it. The smaller apple at the end of the branch will separate just like its petals had months before, but unlike the drifting petals, green apples plummet fast, hitting limbs along the way and crashing through the leaves before finally thudding on the lawn. This is the part you just endure, because you know that the work you put in to picking up the juvenile apples is just part of the process, you tackle the chore and wait for sweeter fruit.
Having grown up during the burgeoning space program, I had romanticized the Air and Space Museum since grade school. Anticipation ran high thinking about what the Smithsonian promised to provide. History, artifacts, science. Powerful upward thrust from burning need…er…fuel ejacula… I mean ejects rockets ever higher until the force is greater than Earth’s gravity. I was happy.
Nathan’s job was done – he’d made the reservations and now it was time for him to sit back and rest on his laurels. I bought a map of DC, packed, and repacked. I tried to ask if we wanted to make dinner reservations early, but he rarely took his earbuds out or looked away from his phone, which played a continuous stream of Japanese anime. Still, DC was on the horizon, and I’d have him to myself for days.
I raked up the grounded apples the day before we left, feeling a bit guilty about the mess that will face the guys who mow in a few days.
I was giddy climbing the stairs to the Air and Space Museum. The Gemini missions, the Apollo flights, the moon rover. Much of this equipment is actually too big for the building, but the history is there, a spacesuit, and a practice rover. I squealed. Nathan’s gaze revealed… nothingness, empty, a vacuum. He said he was ready for lunch.
There is something about dating a younger man that women don’t realize at first. The excitement from sampling forbidden fruit is poisoned when you realize there’s a rotten core. Your point of view about the world is decided by the events and ideological ideals that worm through your childhood home. A generation separated Nathan and I, and there was a fundamental difference in the outlook on life. We might as well had stemmed from different galaxies. Nathan had no idea what we were looking at. He missed out on all that great stuff about escape velocity, Gemini capsule splashdowns, and astronauts quarantined to protect the rest of us from dormant space viruses. His was a fanatical religious upbringing. At the age I sat transfixed in class watching the catwalk to Apollo 11, he learned about original sin and the fall of man. He said he’d meet me back at the hotel later, and left. I didn’t see him again until 4 a.m., because after he had dined by himself, he found homeless men on the streets to have a few drinks with. He stumbled in sloshed and curiously without any remorse about having been missing most of the night. I had been worried; he didn’t text or call, he didn’t answer his phone. I had the typical female thoughts about how I would confess to his parents that I had lost their son. Would his mother and I bond over our mutual maturity, or would she see me as an evil temptress who orchestrated her innocent’s descent into depravity?
Next comes the messy part. Rotten apples covered my landscape. What once held such sweet expectations, now had been run over by the lawn mower—remnants of hope turned to mush. Whereas bees perform necessary work pollinating blossoms, and wouldn’t hurt a human in their midst, wasps feed off fermented fruit and become evil, drunken jerks, with wings. And after sneaking out early in the mornings to rake up bits of slippery brown stinky fruit before the wasps can fly, I’m just too tired to make that pie and fantasize about calling a tree removal service.
Faye Srala is a chemist living in Idaho. She earned a BS in Chemistry from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, an MBA from the University of Utah, and is currently studying creative writing at Idaho State University. When not busy reading and writing, she bakes decadent desserts, drinks wine, and hikes off those calories in the extensive Idaho wilderness. Faye’s work has been published in The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought, and As You Were: The Military Review. Her work has been nominated for The Best of the Net anthology 2025.