We’ve been writing this book in our basement office. Once a dungeonlike storage room, it’s been a cozy space since 1987, when we installed new carpet, paneling, and lighting; put up colorful prints and maps of the world, the United States, and Carroll County; and cleaned grime from the high window that offers a view of the cherry trees east of our house. During the cold months, we work on twin Apple II computers in the toasty company of a woodstove, always happy to break out of the straitjacket of writing and fetch another log from the basement stash. And on the hottest summer days the office is a sanctuary of coolness, a place where two cats, too, find relief.
Every morning as we descend to work, near the foot of the cellar stairs we see the shadowy outlines of a rectangular box, perched above the floor on three apple crates and swathed in blankets. The box is six feet three inches long and two and a half feet wide. Though we can’t see it for the blankets, we know very well what we are walking past. Someday it may yet perform the service for which it was designed. In the meantime it is a daily reminder that to march to our own drummer, we, too, have to be willing to defy convention.
An accomplished carpenter, Frank’s grandfather, Ralph Levering, fashioned three coffins from pine boards he purchased at a lumber company in Mount Airy. It was not the custom of his community. But in 1940 when he was sixty-nine, Ralph thought the time had come. When he was done, each coffin had a fresh coat of chocolate-brown paint on the outside; each had four thick handles, two on each side. To secure the lid, each had four long screws with a heart at the top to be tightened by hand at each corner. When the lid was on tight, these hearts, visible at each corner of the coffin, would be the only adornment for the three plain caskets.
Ralph maintained that coffins, as well as funerals, should be simple and inexpensive. “Father believed that what money we had was a gift from God,” Sam once told us, “and that we should not waste it on ourselves. There were very many useful ways in which money could be used—that helped other people, that helped make the world a better place.”
When Sam’s father died in 1945, the family laid his body in one of the coffins he had made, loaded the coffin onto the back of a truck, and buried it in the cemetery of Willow Hill Church a mile and a half from our home. A memorial service—silent, with people rising to speak when so moved—was held the same day. In 1961 the body of Clara Levering, Ralph’s wife, was placed in the second coffin, trucked by the family to the church, and buried.
In the dark attic of Ralph and Clara’s empty house, one coffin remained. Ralph had not made that pine box for either of his two sons, both of whom would be capable of making their own funeral arrangements. He had made it for his daughter, June.
As Sam remembers his older sister in her early adolescence, June was a quiet, studious girl, with long black hair and a bashful smile. Until the new apple orchard came into bearing, June played an active role in raising the chickens and gathering the eggs for income. Clara taught her three children in her home until they reached high school. At fourteen June was sent to Westtown, a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia.
One night in 1922, when June was a senior, she had what she described to Frank in 1987 as a “breakdown.” She had fallen in love with a young man named Eddie Wood, who worked at the school, and she thought about him constantly. Her love was unrequited. Following an erotic dream about Eddie, she had the breakdown that set the course for her life.
June was taken to an asylum for the mentally ill, run by Quakers. There, among other things, she was soaked in tubs of hot water to relax her nerves. After two months of treatments, without finishing school, she was escorted home on the train by her older brother, Griffith. Concerned that a return to Westtown would only lead to a second breakdown, her parents insisted that she remain at home and help Clara teach. According to Frank’s father, Ralph and Clara attributed June’s illness to a family history of mental trouble. Rather than sending June back into the world, her parents wanted to shelter her at home.
From this distance it will always be impossible to know what the right thing was for June. Within a year, still having dreams about the young man, June suffered another breakdown and was sent to the state hospital in Marion, Virginia, seventy miles away. For the rest of her life she alternated periods at Marion with time on the mountain, having been diagnosed schizophrenic and suffering repeated relapses. She never married; she never dated. In the 1920s, with no training, June took up painting and sketching; her lifelike family portraits and austere renditions of orchard buildings and landscapes are family treasures. In the 1930s she joined the fundamentalist Apostolic Faith Church, and her painting abruptly ceased. The inspiration was gone, she said. When she wasn’t in Marion, her days were filled with chores around the house and garden and Bible reading.
Before he died, Ralph asked Sam to promise that he would take care of June after Clara’s death. From 1961 until 1987, with Miriam’s help, Sam fulfilled that promise. When she wasn’t in Marion, June lived with Frank’s parents in the house where we now live. Musty and empty, the old homeplace up the hill concealed her coffin in a spiderwebbed corner of the attic.
For eleven months after we moved from California, we saw June often. To visit with her, you entered her domain in the downstairs bedroom in the Red House. In what had been her parents’ bedroom, June sat small and hunchbacked on a rocking chair, her hair thin and gray, her bony hands trembling, her voice wispy, strangely ethereal. No longer was she hoeing the garden or walking her letters to friends to the mailbox. Her heart was beating sluggishly, her doctor said. Her ankles were swelling from poor circulation. Except to use the adjoining bathroom, she did not venture from her quarters. Sam and Miriam brought her meals into her room on trays. Scattered around the large room, with its high ceiling, tall windows, and full-length mirror on the bathroom door, were dusty stacks of Apostolic Faith literature and her Bible. She had all but withdrawn from this world. As Virginia’s son, Jack Price, said after visiting her, June was going to “just slip away into thin air” one day soon.
In February of 1987 June agreed to spend time with Frank talking about family history, about her life. Every two or three days, giving her time in between to think about the next topic, Frank brought a tape recorder and stayed an hour—her limit before she tired. June was lucid and intense; sometimes she laughed merrily at a comic recollection; sometimes, as when she talked about her mental trouble or her father’s funeral, her expression was almost frightening in the full flood of memory. In all, Frank spent twelve hours learning many things he’d never known about his family. After the twelfth hour he and his aunt agreed that they would stop for the time being, to resume their joint travel into the past if either felt the need.
One Wednesday, March 18, two weeks after the last session, Frank had a fever and spent the day in bed. That evening Wanda returned with Sam and Miriam from a day in Greensboro. Shortly after Wanda entered our house, the phone rang. “We’ve found June in her room,” Miriam told Frank. “We think she’s gone.”
Virginia, a former nurse, arrived shortly ahead of us and took her pulse. “She’s passed on,” Virginia said. Behind her on the floor, June lay slumped against the mirror on the bathroom door that she had shattered as she fell. Shards of mirror glass lay around her on the floor.
Her heart had finally given out on her. A blustery March evening wind beat against the house, rattling the old windows. We sat together by the woodstove until Sam announced his intentions. He was the lone survivor of the family of five that had lived in the log cabin for two years until the Red House was finished. He would carry out his final responsibility to his parents and to his sister.
Early the next morning Sam called the county coroner in Hillsville and asked him to drive out to the orchard and confirm June’s death. The coroner refused. Sam had to have the body brought to a funeral home, he said, where he would issue the death certificate. No, Sam said, he did not intend to deal with a funeral home. And wasn’t the coroner being paid to go wherever was necessary to confirm a death? The coroner was indignant. Well then, he said, if Sam wasn’t going to do the proper thing and use a funeral home, he would have to bring in the body to his office.
Garnet Dawson, along with his son and nephew, helped Frank carry the coffin down from the attic of the Red House. The four men lifted June’s body into the sheet-lined coffin and loaded it onto the back of our open-air pickup. As Frank drove Wanda and Sam into Hillsville, his father brooded in silence. We parked in the lot behind the coroner’s office, walked into the waiting room, and announced ourselves to the receptionist.
We waited. And waited. After half an hour Sam rose without warning and marched past the receptionist into the inner office. We heard heated voices. In a few moments Sam emerged, arms folded tight across his chest in one of his telltale signs of anger.
The coroner was behind him, his face flushed. “This isn’t the way it’s done,” the coroner said. “You have to go through a funeral home.”
Sam glared up at the much taller man, perhaps fifteen years his junior. “Show me the law,” he said.
The coroner was mute. There was no law in Virginia that said a body must be disposed of through a funeral home. “All right,” he said. “You’ll have to bring her in here.”
Sam stared incredulously. As the coroner turned to step back into his office, Frank intervened, telling him that June was in a coffin and there were only three of us to carry it in, one being his seventy-nine-year-old father.
“Wait outside,” the coroner snapped. “I’ll be out.”
We waited at the pickup. After fifteen minutes the coroner stepped crisply to the truck and we lifted the lid. He pulled back the sheet over her body and gave it a cursory glance, quickly took a pulse, then informed us that June was dead. We would need to return to his office to collect the death certificate and pay his fee. Without another word he marched back inside.
It was thirteen miles home, and despite the strangeness of it all and Sam’s continuing anger, we were with him in spirit as well as on that winding country road. He was doing what he thought was the right thing.
The evening June died, Sam announced that he and his sister had agreed that she would be cremated. As he saw it, it was as simple a burial as one making use of the old coffin. It would cost a little more, but ashes would consume less space in the cemetery. Cremation would also allow time for more family members to gather for a memorial service.
Wanda called around and found what was by far the lowest price: a Greensboro, North Carolina, crematorium would do the work for two hundred dollars. Wanda secured a permit to transport the body out of state—no mean feat, as the woman who issued the permit was forced to call Richmond to verify procedure. Never in her six years on the job, she explained had such a request come from an individual.
Sam rode with Frank the 150-mile round trip in the pickup. A few miles from downtown Greensboro, the crematorium stood alone in a field across from a pasture. Frank backed the truck up to the loading dock of the two-story brick building, and two men wheeled the coffin inside. Frank helped them load the empty coffin back onto the truck. Sam and Frank drove home; June’s ashes would return in a small box, via the U.S. Postal Service.
The following Sunday a memorial service was held at Willow Hill Moravian Church, where Sam’s family is buried, and which his parents attended along with the Quaker meetings in Mount Airy. In June, when several of Frank’s siblings who had missed the first service were visiting, a graveside service was held with only family members present. With a shovel, Frank buried Junes ashes in the red clay beside the graves of her parents, brother, Griffith, and sister-in-law, Martha Leutsker Levering.
At the first service neighbors whom June had taught remembered her as a caring teacher. At her grave Sam spoke in a broken voice of his sister as a woman who had braved mental illness without complaint and unselfishly helped others in her family and community.
No doubt there was truth in those perceptions; there was also the lingering mystery of an outwardly gentle, inwardly stormy woman who had lived in the shadow of her parents and brothers. Yet in death, as in life, June was part of a distinct tradition that Sam had stubbornly honored. Simplicity and devotion to family and to one’s idea of God, of what is spiritual and enduring, were at the core of the tradition that sank its taproot deep into the family’s past.
Never more so than at the time of June’s death, living here has exposed us to that tradition and forced us to consider how much we are or would like to be a part of it. It has caused us to think about how simplicity in its many forms can help one grow spiritually—spirituality defined as one’s sense of belonging in creation, as connection with life outside oneself and with life’s sources.
In the likely event that we are alive when any of them die, we do not wish to duplicate, with our parents, the peregrinations we had with June. Recently Frank’s parents have declared their intentions to donate their bodies to a medical school, and we are pleased that friends have been asked to arrange the transport when the time comes. Still, we were moved by Sam’s love for his sister, his grief, and his courage to be himself within the frame of his tradition. His actions have given us inspiration, a myth of defiance of narrow conformity, as we pass by Aunt June’s coffin every day.
There are many other fitting ways to honor the dead, but this one we could gladly call our own. In the company of others who have seen more of life and death than we, whose religious faith is heartfelt, we felt ourselves being stretched out of our old selves toward the intuition of a more spiritual sense of life. Not only do possessions and the almighty pursuit of money, careers, and social acceptance darken the windows of perception; so does the refusal to acknowledge what is powerful, what is ultimately mystical, in one’s own backyard. The simplicity with which June was laid to rest and remembered made her more immediate, more real; linked us—through her—to our own mortality and to the urgency of love that drives us as we live.
Still, as each generation has done here, we must live our own lives. Ralph and Clara drew definitive boundaries between right and wrong and established themselves as moral exemplars in a rough-hewn mountain community. They shielded their children from what they regarded as immoral influences, and the rules they taught them were strict: no smoking, no drinking, no premarital sex, no divorce, no luxury of any kind. They were active in the life of the community—in the church, in education.
Less involved in the immediate community, Sam and Miriam joined national organizations and helped create some of their own in a campaign for world peace. To them, Sam’s parents often seemed overly judgmental, their mountain world too provincial. Still, with Sam and Miriam, sex roles at home were clearly defined. Until all but their last child was grown, Sam was the orchardist, Miriam the homemaker. In no uncertain terms they asked their children to be staunch Quakers like themselves, but—at least by the time Frank entered college—they balanced prohibition with the need for exploration.
Living our own lives in Virginia is a balancing act of its own, more intuitive at times than rational. What’s right and wrong is not as clear to us as it apparently was for Ralph and Clara and as it is for both our sets of parents. Without the old absolutes to guide us, we feel our way toward answers that work for us on issues ranging from divorce to the use of alcohol and the nature of God, luxury, and feminism. One thing is certain: June’s life stands as a haunting reminder of the price paid for failing to establish one’s own identity, independent of received wisdom.
For us, a world without imagination would be a world without God; giving voice to the fanciful is a way of igniting the spark of divinity within.
On a Saturday night in October of 1987, we started a Halloween party tradition that we hope to carry on well into our second childhood. In addition to wanting to have a good time, we also wanted to open our house to our community.
For the festivities, Frank and Randall Dawson trucked the coffin down from the Red House attic, where it had been stored since June’s death. They set the coffin on the apple crates on which it still rests. Wanda designed the invitations, most of which we hand-delivered to scores of startled neighbors within a five- or six-mile radius of our house. We mailed others to more distant friends. Because this was a first-time event, and because our neighbors are elaborately polite, if not always forthright, it was difficult to get a reading on just how many people would show for the “First Annual Levering orchard Halloween Party.” But with the help of our friends Bonni Kogen and her husband, Andrew Brodnick, from New York, and Frank’s cousin Chris Wellons and his wife, Sandy Webbere, from Raleigh, we stocked up with homemade cookies, newly picked, caramel-coated apples, nuts, wine, and apple cider, hoping for at least a modest showing.
It was a balmy evening, with a gentle wind rustling what golden leaves remained on the cherry trees. Shortly before eight o’clock, the first guests drove under the pecan tree near the barn, where a huge “ghost”—a sheet with a straw-stuffed head—“floated” just above the car’s windshield. Driving past our house, they parked on the open field below and—under a brilliant full moon—followed the path illuminated by candles in glass jars past two eerily lifelike Styrofoam “tombstones,” which had once been used on a movie set. Glancing at the flickering jack-o’-lantern on the front porch, they entered the house, little knowing what was in store for them that evening.
Before the witching hour of midnight—when Frank’s horrific movie, Parasite, was screened on the VCR for a roomful of night owls—what we estimated to be one hundred and fifty guests had entered into the spirit of the occasion. Many had enjoyed an audience with the mysterious Madame Petrovsky a fortune-teller sequestered in a room off the hall, dressed in a long black veil, with ruby lips and forbidding eyebrows. Escorted by one of the hosts, each guest descended by candlelight into the basement as a tape played the sound of a heartbeat in the darkness. It was necessary, the host would say, to “pay respects to the deceased.” As he or she opened the lid of the coffin, cousin Chris, in a homemade devil’s costume, complete with horns and a pitchfork, lunged out of the coffin and sank his claws into human flesh.
Nor was this the last of the frights. Late in the evening Andrew gathered the crowd beside the tombstones at the edge of the yard, one of which read:
Dr. Ralph Levering
Born Feb. 27, 1947
Died Oct. 30, 1987
Gone to Be an Angle
As Andrew conducted a service for Frank’s late, lamented brother and new “angle,” a hand slowly wriggled out of the freshly spaded dirt beside the tombstone. As parry guests shrank back, Frank staggered from the grave, his face ghoulish with berry-stained “blood.” It had been a long wait—ten minutes lying stiff as a corpse and claustrophobic under the pile of branches that covered his face—but the effort was worth it. Shrieks of terror and delight followed.
None of these party stunts, we realize, rival Dante or Virginia Woolf as examples of the human imagination at its most transcendent. But they seemed to fit the down-home occasion. Neighbors and friends—who came as everything from a tube of toothpaste to Richard Nixon—played their roles to the hilt, having a great “frolic,” as the mountain people say. Our neighbors just down the mountain, a couple in their early twenties who also have an orchard, came in homemade striped convict suits and went clanking around together throughout the evening, linked by a chain. Another young orchardist, thinking it the gracious thing to do, brought a jug of homemade moonshine as a gift, a portion of which our Manhattan friends carted back to the city as a memento of their Appalachian visit. Before they departed, many of the guests made sure they would be invited to the party the following year.
Without knowing if they would enjoy themselves, we were also delighted to see our neighbors in the cove reincarnated in their second childhoods. Later they all spoke fervently of what a fine thing it was to see the community together and to be able to catch up with neighbors they rarely took time to visit, as they had in the days before television.
Removing some false teeth to create the right snaggle-toothed effect, Virginia appeared on our doorstep as a witch in a black dress and hat she’d made herself; on a leash was her black cat, Delilah. Miriam basked for days in the afterglow of her success as Madame Petrovsky. Sam, whom we had feared would feel the chill of the demons of his own upbringing and take a dim view of the party, wore sandals and a white bathrobe and swung a kerosene lantern. Neighbors accustomed to his eccentricities had one more story for their collections. After peering at disquieted partygoers in the glow of the lantern, Sam told them he was the ancient Greek Diogenes, searching among them for one honest man.
On Sunday mornings beginning at nine, we aren’t carrying a lantern as we sit with Sam, Miriam, and several other regulars in forty minutes of silent meeting in Mount Airy. If light comes, it’s from within. But like Diogenes, we are searching—not for one honest man, but for the modicum of self-knowledge that mere mortals are granted.
Many Quakers would insist that simplicity in all of its aspects must come from a unified vision of the nature of God. In the life of Jesus, they would argue, are found the essential, eternal truths from which simplicity follows. Those who would simplify their lives must forge a binding relationship with God, much as Jesus did. Simplicity does not engender a more spiritual life; the spiritual life engenders simplicity.
For us, the search for meaning that is a necessary dimension of simplifying one’s life need not follow in the footsteps of theology. The quest for a simpler life is itself an infinite journey toward God, harboring the growing sense not of transcendence, but of commitment to this earth in all of its—and our—imperfections.
As the Japanese poet Basho wrote, “Life is a journey, and the journey itself home.” It is the search—the journey and not the destination, the questions more readily than the answers—that is most real for us. For us, spirituality is, first, the art of learning where you are, wherever that may be. As the American writer Annie Dillard put it in Holy the Firm, “Every day is a god.” We live at the miraculous level of mundane existence, not in the hope of heaven or nirvana, not even in the mystical union with God that is the yearning, perhaps at times the reality, of the devout.
Our faith in the orchard has been tested. After the euphoria of our magnificent 1988 cherry crop, in 1989 when our fruit blossomed too early and late, killing frosts passed us over, we believed we had been favored with a “miracle,” in Sam’s words, to have cherries at all. So we proclaimed our “miracle crop” with a banner headline in our annual customer newsletter. Just maybe this would be the year in which we reduced orchard indebtedness to the lowest level in Frank’s memory.
What we did not anticipate—especially after the drought of the previous summer, which had enabled us to stretch our normal four-week season to almost eight weeks—was monsoon-like rain. But rain came in sheets just two days before opening day and continued throughout June of 1989, pounding inch upon inch on our fragile cherries until a record fifteen inches were recorded for that month.
Miracle crop indeed! Not only were our pick-your-own customers put off by having to pick in slickers and umbrellas, but the fruit couldn’t withstand the onslaught. Ripe cherries cracked open from the absorbed water, and many rotted. What’s more, with only sporadic sunshine, the cherries that survived never fully sweetened.
Though our cherry set was close to that of the 1988 crop, our gross sales were only one-third of the previous year’s. We tightened our belts even more and could only hope that 1990 would bring better luck.
As January 1990’s warm weather failed to break, we grew anxious, wincing at the springlike temperatures that non-fruit growers in the region savored. When our cherry trees bloomed in March, the ever-optimistic Sam said we had a “fifty-fifty chance” of their making it through to bearing without killing cold. Then, on March 20, warned by the weatherman of an incoming blast of frigid air, we kept a sleepless vigil. It was a windy night—no amount of smudge pots (which we didn’t have anyway) could have heated the air enough to help. At four A.M. Frank stared grimly for the umpteenth time at the thermometer on our north porch. The temperature read 25 degrees, then hung there for hours. After sunrise we trudged with Sam into the orchard, into the heart and soul of the business: the sweet cherry trees. From various sections of the orchard we broke off handfuls of twigs, gathering blossoms and buds. Later, when our samples had thawed, we cut into them with razor blades at the Red House. Rather than living green tissue, we sliced into the blighted brown of freeze-killed tissue. Very likely we would have no sweet cherries at all. Before the day was over, we learned that all the peaches, nectarines, and almost all the sour cherries and plums had been killed, too. Only the apples survived. We thought we’d hit bottom in 1989 with rain every day, but this luck was far worse.
But, we told ourselves—almost as optimistic as Sam or as a baseball manager in spring training—there’s always next year. Now we’re having a good fruit season—not spectacular but not bad. In poor years we’re learning to cut our losses and put what nature gives us in a longer-term perspective. In good years we try simply to be grateful. Either way we don’t forget our dependence on natural forces beyond our control. It’s true—Leverings and now an Urbanska have been living here for more than eighty years. But so have wind, rain, warm sunlight, and killing cold.
It’s August now, and creation gets hard to love. Whenever we work outside, we drip sweat. The sun stalks us, striding over the east ridge by eight-thirty and shooting into the cove. No wind brings relief, and this August there is no rain—only the dry heaves of distant thunder.
Deprived of long vistas in the late summer haze, we must choose the short ones. The world ends at the edge of the orchard. We rub our eyes and look at dew. In the ethereal light of dawn, it sheathes Walt Whitman’s leaves of grass in a quicksilver sparkle. Even with the dry weather, the yard needs mowing; it’s been a month now, almost. Cool to the touch, the first blades wet our bare feet. Dew oozes between the toes and drenches skin as we step. Our jeans dampen at the cuffs.
The full pour of August light, the heat of the day will dampen the concert. At this moment—with no human voices, no televisions blaring, no gears grinding on the mountain road—it’s the birds’ show, sound waves crisscrossing the cove from one island of forest to the other. “Maids, maids, maids, put on your teakettle,” sings a hidden song sparrow. “Che-wink, che-wink,” offers a towhee. High in a tree somewhere a warbler cries, “See, see, see,” but we don’t see. We only hear.
Something’s thrashing in the holly tree. It flashes from the serrated edge: a female cardinal on the wing, her body olive green and drab as an old sock. She rockets up the hill, swoops into the billowy green mountain ash beside the barn. She’s invisible again. A limb throbs, like the broken surface of a pond when a frog’s dived in.
These birds—that eat our cherries as well as seeds and insects—aren’t alone in their love of the fruits of our labor. Groundhogs strip the bark from young fruit trees, sometimes killing them, and need no invitation to dine on windfall fruit. Quite rare in the community when Frank was growing up, deer are now abundant and seem to love nothing more than grazing on the twigs of young fruit trees, stunting their growth. Wild turkeys have also made a comeback, though they are much too shy to invade the orchard. Early this spring, as we were descending our mountain from a climb, a flock exploded in front of us, plunging deeper into the forest in lumbering flight, like miniature cargo planes with red necks. Though we have often seen where they have been scratching the ground, it was our first glimpse of these four-feet-long birds that only a decade ago were unknown in Orchard Gap.
We step to the northern edge of the yard and walk a slow circle around the perimeter as the sky splashes more and more light on the palette. It’s a Rousseau painting, weeds and all. Gone are the flowers of spring and early summer, virginal dashes of color in their neat beds. Here are the flowers of August, wild and domestic—a jungle riot, decadent and lush despite the lack of rain. The very names are sensual: althea, goldenglow, viola, cockle, milkweed, Japanese iris, bergamot, four-o’clock, hollyhock, pink lily. We lap up the profusion, the swirls of reds, blues, whites, yellows, and pinks spread five and ten feet deep beyond the yard, and try to see individuality: the spiky red petals of the bergamot with its long, square stem; the velvety white, pink, and magenta folds of the hollyhock petals with gilded outer edges.
We bring in phlox, slip it into a glass vase filled with water on the kitchen table. It’s a simple and elegant bouquet—lavender petals bunched high on a long, slender stalk. We make coffee, eat cereal and homemade applesauce, and go to work. When we sit down to dinner that evening, a few scattered petals lie curled on the tablecloth, the first casualties of domesticity.
August is the high season for vegetables. At noon the next day we peer into the haze from the front porch and thank God (and the Indians) for corn. It’s not just the taste—the flavor of ripe ears that ten minutes before the first toothy crunch were still growing on the stalk. It’s the beauty of corn rows a hundred feet from the kitchen stove, eight or nine feet high, leaves glistening, trapping a pool of dense emerald light in their shade. July thunderstorms made them tall. Now we disappear between two rows, brush silky cornstalk flesh, looking for the dark brown tassles that betray ripeness, and pick a dozen ears into a bucket. Then it’s out into the sun—plucking blood-red tomatoes from staked vines, fresh lettuce (from the second planting, the first having gone leathery), and yellow squash tucked demurely beneath a tall canopy of broad, sandpapery leaves, little hairs on the squash that make it downy to the touch. We tug at the base of crimson stalks, and two beets appear, Christmas tree ornaments coated with dirt.
With August evenings comes pesto. Not every evening—it just seems that way. After jogging, Wanda goes out in the twilight to gather the glossy leaves from the basil plants, filling a two-cup measuring cup to the brim. A neighbor’s cow lows from the foot of the mountain. A bobwhite rings out its name loud as a pistol shot.
Over by the cottage where Miriam’s parents lived in their last years, Koh, the dog, is groundhog hunting again. Officially he’s Sam and Miriam’s dog—part collie, part shepherd, an adult dog with long tan-and-white fur and a handsome profile—named for T. T. B. Koh of Singapore, president of the Law of the Sea Conference in the early eighties. Unofficially he’s the orchard mascot. Several years ago when jogging, we found him prostrated in the middle of the dirt road, his head scraping the ground. He had a collar but no tag, and when we petted him he followed us on to the church, then back home, where Frank’s parents adopted him. Since no one claimed him, we determined that he was “set out,” as the local saying goes—abandoned by someone on the side of the road. When we jog, which is most days, Koh invariably runs along, prancing down the same road on which we found him.
As Wanda kneels at the basil plants, Koh stiffens at one of the multiple entrances to the groundhog’s underground den, his body arched forward, his long nose pointed at the hole. The groundhogs safe in his den. When Koh’s not in the neighborhood, we often see the “whistlepig,” as the mountain people call this creature the size of a large cat, standing on its hind legs surveying the world.
After ten minutes the basil leaves a pungent, minty scent on Wanda’s hands. She walks them over to Virginia’s and uses her food processor to blend the leaves with garlic, walnuts, Parmesan cheese, and olive oil into pesto sauce. Back in our kitchen, Frank has made a salad from the garden and cooked pasta.
We eat on the front porch, our plates in our laps. A mourning dove moans to the east, a high, lonesome lament. Way up on our mountain to the north, a hoot owl booms, its “Who? Who? Who?” resounding from the forest. The moon lifts over the ridge to the southeast, swimming yellow in the haze, just a few days short of full. A pair of bats flutter across its face, skitter and swoop in a crazy dance, their silhouettes jagged against the sky. In the fading twilight it’s hard to get a close look at them—but then perhaps we shouldn’t wish for it too strongly lest the wish come true.
The bats keep dancing, crisscrossing each other’s paths. This is their party, not ours, and they’ll carry on for as long as they damn well please. Like stunt pilots competing for attention, they careen out over the Damson plum trees at the edge of the yard, loop back toward the moon and the Windsor cherry, forty-nine years old and dying, limb by limb, in the east yard. Suddenly they veer back our way through the limbs of the white pine tree, and—instinctively—we duck. The air whiffles as they pass along the edge of the porch.
“I’m through with dinner,” Wanda remarks.
“Same here,” echoes her husband.
We go inside and clean up the kitchen. Night falls, and the kitchen casts a rim of light through the open screened windows onto the porch. We peer outside, hoping to see the bats, but find only the August moon.
“Guess they’re gone,” Frank says.
“They seem to be a pair, don’t they?” Wanda says.
Having cut down more than half of our old Red Delicious apple trees, we’re now down to maybe three thousand bushels. This year Garnet and Frank will pick the crop themselves. Shortly before Labor Day, when the apple season begins, they’ll hook up the hydraulic lift to the back of the tractor and haul bins into the orchard on the old flatbed army truck. The tractor will move the bins from tree to tree, and a second tractor and lift—borrowed from a neighbor—will load the full bins into the truck for hauling to the packhouse.
Glen Dawson and Sam will do the grading on the old Durand-Weyland grader. The smallest apples will fall through the holes in the sizing belt and go to the cider plant near Roanoke. Most will be sold retail out on the loading dock, where Sam, Glenn, and, at the busiest times, Wanda and Miriam will offer customers a selection among Red and Golden Delicious, Spartan, Fuji, Crispin Mutsu, Stayman Winesap, Granny Smith, and York Imperial.
In our unbiased opinion, the simple apple remains one of the Almighty’s proudest inventions. By the time it’s matured on a tree for five or six months, drinking in rain, air, and sunlight, an apple is no longer merely an apple. Like ourselves, an apple is a living thing. The freckles are called lenticels, and they are breathing pores by which the apple inhales. Until the time of consumption, an apple is alive and breathing. As our teeth bite into it, we hear the sharp report of thousands of living, breathing cells, their membranes crunched in a sound that conjures up the pure joy of partaking.
Unless our stars are crossed, sometime in the third week of October the apple harvest will be all but finished. The nights will be cool, but not yet cold enough for frost. The days will be unpredictable—some golden and drowsily warm, others brisk enough for a sweatshirt and light jacket. In the woods the poplars and maples and oaks and birches will be ablaze, but if it rains, the leaves will come swirling down until the trees wear a tattered look. And if we see no son or daughter or cousin of Hugo—the hurricane that in three hours huffed and puffed a thousand or more bushels from our trees in 1989—we will praise the gods of wind.
The last tree to be picked is always the old York Imperial. Two years ago in March we planted twenty young Yorks, but they haven’t yet come into bearing, and this venerable giant remains our lone source for the lopsided, red and yellow apples that make tangy pies and are excellent keepers. The tree is east of the Red House a couple hundred yards, nestled against one of the rock walls that Frank’s grandfather built along the contour of the hillside. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers, seven- or eight-inch-tall woodpeckers with red necks and caps, have drilled neat rows of holes in the trunk, extracting sap from the inner bark. But on a good year the old York tree with its sixty-foot wingspan still turns out thirty-five to forty bushels. Set out in 1911, it’s the only remaining fruit tree planted by the orchard’s founder.
Ralph Levering died on a Monday morning in May 1945, not long after the apple trees had shed their blossoms, three months before the bombs fell at Hiroshima. At seventy-four he felt chest pains on a Sunday evening, having returned the day before from a week-long college reunion in Maryville, Tennessee. He lay down on his bed in the same room where June would die forty-two years later. He would see the doctor in the morning.
On the eastern side of the Red House, the tall bedroom windows admitted the light of dawn, and Clara left the bed and entered the kitchen. “I hear the birds singing,” she heard her husband say.
There are those who speak of the virtues of living in the moment. In that moment, one of his last on earth, Ralph was hearing the birds singing. He had asked for a glass of water. When Clara returned from the kitchen a few moments later, the man she had married in 1898, who had fathered her three children, who had brought her to this remote mountain community and shared her adult life, was dead.
We don’t know where he is now, this man who found this place with his feet as well as his heart. But we feel his presence—in the barn and the house and the sheds he built, in the rock walls that haven’t crumbled, in the York Imperial tree. And in the coffin that sits in our basement.
That coffin reminds us of how well we want to live in the time that we, too, are here. Not insulated by luxury, but in the beauty and truth of nature as it is. Not cut off from our community and the world community, but taking an active part in vital change. Not in abstinence, but in sufficiency. Not in fear of death, but in love of life. Not only as caretakers of tradition, but as tradition makers who can learn from the new insights of the present as well as the time-tested verities of the past.
Here in Virginia we have discovered that—though no one is ever free of contradictions—one can change the general direction of one’s life, can make it simpler and more satisfying in a range of important respects. With us, because we found no quick fixes, because our lives hold the potential for as much complexity at the orchard as they had in Los Angeles, change has not happened overnight or without a small mountain of struggle. But we have changed, and we continue to change as we hone our desires and pursue goals that bring our lives and ideals into closer alignment.
In life here at the orchard, and in our travels, it is a joy to have learned that we are not alone in the quest not for more, but for better. While many Americans remain attached to traditional standards of material progress, others are examining their values, their priorities, their lifelong goals, and are choosing to measure gain not by what they have, but by who they are, by how they live.
The moon is full tonight. Long after darkness has fallen it peeks over the high east ridge, finds us on the porch as we sit listening to the frogs down the hill. Up the hill, Sam and Miriam’s lights have gone out. So, too, have Virginia’s to the east and, a half mile down the mountain, Garnet and Esther’s lights as well. In these ancient mountains, old as time itself, almost, it’s getting late.
“The sun,” Thoreau wrote, “is but a morning star.” On a night like this we imagine that we feel what that crusty old bachelor must have felt, the exuberance of new possibility, of seeing a richer way of living. We feel a fullness, like the moon’s. We’ve worked all day, some at the computer, some in the sun. Now we sit on the porch and talk about nothing terribly important and fall silent, as married couples do, and talk again. We grow drowsy. The frogs croak. The moon glides higher, casting a silver sheen on the haze in the valley. Life is good. We want more of it, not less.