Apple

My house lies at the foot of the Niagara escarpment. From the front porch, looking straight up, I can see the hospital buildings where I've spent so much of the last nine months. Next to it, a few low rise apartment buildings flanking one tall white one, and below them all the grey face of the cliff, covered in now-leafless trees. As the crow flies, it's less than a kilometre from my front door to the hospital, a mere twenty minutes and five hundred steps up the Wentworth stairs if you decide on walking instead of driving.

From the vantage point of the mountain brow path, I can locate my house easily by the great Norway maple that graces our front lawn. From up there, the city spreads out wide, with the towers of downtown to the left of me and the great sprawl of the steel factories to the right. Beyond that lies the bay, and the wide expanse of Lake Ontario. On a clear day, Toronto's skyline glints in the distance, and the naked eye can trace the escarpment's outline for fifty miles in either direction.

I've walked that path many times this year, more than ever this past autumn when I underwent the third and final stage of my treatment, daily radiation. Radiation began on October 16th, the same day I gave birth to Emma, and ended on November 21st, 8 months to the day I had my first infusion. I allowed myself to feel those echoes as little magical numerical motifs, to imagine auspicious omens were being delivered to me by the algorithms of the hospital scheduling software.

Unlike the many months of chemotherapy when it was all I could do to make it through the days and peel myself off the couch to walk around the block, during radiation I felt physically and emotionally able to take myself to and from appointments on my own. I relished the opportunity to park a little further away and get a few steps in, enjoying the changing colours of a late fall landscape. I admired the perfect shape of a particular locust tree that refused to shed a single leaf of her bright saffron mantle. I wondered to myself how many shades of changing green I was beholding in that wide view - a thousand? ten thousand? I smiled at the strange Seussian shape of the sumac stands with their spindly branches and wine-coloured clusters.

The tree that most took my fancy was an old apple tree that clings to the edge of the eroding edge of the escarpment. I imagine a hundred and fifty years ago, this tree was in someone’s small field, far enough from the edge of the cliff that one might sit beneath its healthy branches and look out over the splendour of Burlington Bay. Now, in this new young millennium, this gnarled and weatherbeaten tree, with a hollow in its side and burrs along its thickest limb, this unlikely creature growing in the shadow of tall buildings with half its root structure covered in blacktop, this hardy creature is bearing fruit while at the same time holding on for dear life against the forces of erosion, pollution, neglect and old age. This is a tree I could relate to from the first moment we met.

Back to October 16th, the first day of radiation. It was well into apple harvest season. There was still plenty of round red fruit hanging from the branches, though not one of them hung on the sidewalk side of the tree. Every remaining apple dangled beyond the reach of human hands, beyond even the courage of the daredevil darting black squirrels, the hundred foot drop down to the winding switchback asphalt of the Sherman Cut a most efficient deterrent. These were picture perfect apples.

Over the six weeks of daily walks past the tree, the number of apples slowly dwindled - windfall, gravity, who knows - but on the last day of treatment, November 21st, the tree was still not bare. I’d like to tell you there were 8 apples still remaining, one for each of the months I tenaciously endured treatment, and that those apples symbolized for me the triumph of sweetness and bounty over peril and precarity. In fact, when I started writing this piece, back in early November, that’s where I imagined I’d end up, with another ‘magical numerical motif’ and a satisfying conclusion for reader, and writer, alike.

But the truth is, I have no idea how many apples hung on the tree on that day. I don’t remember much about that last afternoon of treatment. I remember that the crew of radiation techs I’d spent those weeks with were all somehow off work that day. The ringing of the bell felt strangely anticlimactic, and the plans Geoff and I made to celebrate afterwards were foregone in favour of coming home and having either a good cry, or a nap, or both, and tending to my broken body.

There was no tidy conclusion waiting for me on that day, nor has there been on any day since, despite my longing for it. Only now, in this very moment, do I realize that this the real reason I have procrastinated so long on this essay. How do you write a piece about an ending that isn’t an ending? More to the point, how do you END a piece about an ending that isn’t an ending?

Today is December 21st, the shortest day of the year and the day I promised I would put this piece out into the world. As the sun goes down, I get into the car and drive up the cut, to see if the tree has anything to say about how to end this story. By the time I park, the path is pitch dark, gusts of icy wind buffeted blow up off the lake, and the moon barely hints at its presence behind low grey clouds. All the trees are naked and shivering. The apple tree is bare, there is no fruit there for me to see, never mind count, though I look and look as though the looking will conjure it.

Peering into the void to search for things that are no longer there is a cold and lonely pursuit. This is a lesson the tree teaches me on the longest night.

Some feeling not unlike grief comes over me. After all that came before, after all the tree has endured and symbolized, that it should find itself alone and cold and barren, hanging on in the dark waiting for some blooming that is yet months off is so poignant to me that I feel tears come to my eyes.

Becoming something new after losing everything that defined you takes patience. This is a lesson the tree teaches me on the longest night.

That this tree-friend, that started as a young and supple shoot, should become, over time almost unrecognizable, its growth paused and stunted for reasons beyond its control, with nothing to do but wait for the return of the sun, the very fact of its suffering carves out a hollow space in me. Yet I know that a hollow in a tree tree is a sign of a healing tree, it is the tree itself carving space around what has been hurt, making room for new life.

The darkness and the light come and go, again and again, and the miracle of life continues on because of and in spite of this endless dance. This is a lesson the tree teaches me on the longest night.