The Life of Lou Ruppert

During prayer this morning, I found myself vividly remembering an abandoned apple orchard. It was thirty years ago. I was about five. It was cold and wet and gray. I could actually feel the moisture of the air on my skin. I don’t know why we were there, but I remember that the apples were yellow and brown, and that I could smell them. If you’ve ever been in an apple orchard after most of the apples and leaves have fallen, there’s a very noticeable scent of autumn leaves and rotten apples. It’s a sweet musty smell, like a freshly cut pear paired with an October lawn.

I remember being utterly fascinated that apples could be yellow. How could they be yellow and still be mature? All of the apples in the storybooks were bright red. Apples were mealy things you got from supermarkets, smelling of plastic and medicine, and tasting like nothing in particular. But here were yellow apples and they were real. I was told that people cook with the yellow apples. I might as well have been looking at a unicorn standing there in the mist, beneath the low scratchy branches of the untended trees. Apples could be yellow. Why did nobody else know this?

The memory lasts about five seconds. I don’t know why my brain saved that one over the countless others of my childhood. There’s so much encoded into the memory that it’s almost like I have access to an experimental time machine. I can feel sensation as I think of it, the cold wet air, the rough ground and slippery leaves under my feet. The rotten apples that spread like butter when you step on them with a very slight impression of something popping. I can smell the wet air, the rotten apples, the wood, the musty leaves. It’s gray enough out that there should be a fog, but there isn’t one. It might be raining or snowing, but I don’t remember, because in the memory I’m not looking up. I’m looking down, below the low branches of the shrubby trees, at bright yellow apples. Their color is the freckled love child of a phone book and a manila folder, but I couldn’t describe it that way in the memory, because at that age, I’ve never seen either of those two things. I’m not thinking about office supplies or telecom equipment at that age. The memory morphs into my preschool imaginings of my cousin Barbara making an apple pie and I’m back in 2008 surrounded by a prison of civil engineering whose wardens know nothing about apple orchards.

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