She said the gleaner would arrive at three.
We visit this widow nearly a year after the loss,
a long suffering for them both.
The sun low, the air cooling, we step
from the glassed-in mudroom into the kitchen
where her bounty of prismed applesauce
lies pooled on the countertops in mason jars.
The sixty-year-old house is redolent of apples,
and farther in, the stuffiness of old furniture,
dust, and the dogs she has trained for years.
Her elbow is sore from peeling, she says.
Her orchard is small, only five trees,
across from a rain-greened horse pasture.
My husband helps her move some furniture back
into a newly painted bedroom. I pass through
the double Dutch door to see the yellow lab puppy,
who nuzzles my hands and bumps against my legs,
then delicately nips a square of quilting material
from a stack and offers it to me to tug.
She points out the room where he spent
his last months, and we settle onto an old sofa
glistening with cat hairs. The window’s light
reveals the thin, haggard face and long, lank gray hair,
her listlessness grows animated only when she
shows us what the puppy has learned so far,
to sit, lie down, wait for a treat, focus on her face.
He may one day become a veteran’s service dog
if she trains him well enough, and if it is in his nature.
The doorbell rings, it is the gleaner who will gather
the fallen apples for whoever or whatever can use them.
No fruit need go unused, even those whose
ripeness has passed, whose grip on the branch
has grown weak, when they lie scattered on the ground.
Such a well-observed, evocative rendering of the weight of loss and the quotidian concerns of the life that remains.
A beautiful poem that the reader can step into–