“I planted those trees the year my daughter was born. They bulldozed them on her birthday.”
The land behind my house used to smell like spring apples and dry leaves. You wouldn’t know it now, standing here with the wind kicking up bits of gravel from a parking lot.
They slapped down asphalt where the roots once ran deep. Laid fluorescent lights over soil that raised three generations. And all for a damn dollar store that sells plastic junk from across the ocean.
I’m not bitter. Not really. But I remember.
It was 1983 when I put the first sapling in the ground. A spindly little McIntosh. My wife, Janie, held our newborn girl in a sling on her chest, reading instructions from a magazine she tore out at the doctor’s office. We didn’t know much about trees, but we knew about love. And work.
By ’89, the orchard stretched five acres. I was still working nights at the paper mill then, coming home smelling like ink and boiling rollers. But on weekends, I tended those trees like they were part of the family.
Pruned them by hand. Hauled water from the rain barrel. My daughter, Ellie, learned her colors from apple skins—green for Granny Smith, red for Fuji, yellow for Golden Delicious.
Every fall, we’d invite the neighbors to pick their fill. No signs, no scales. Just folks filling baskets and waving thank you from the end of the drive. It wasn’t a business. It was something else—something real.
A place where people remembered each other’s names. Where kids pulled wagons full of apples and parents sat on milk crates, swapping stories over cider.
Then the mill closed.
Then the gas station.
Then the family that ran the diner sold it to a Subway franchise. The kind where the bread smells like a chemistry set.
The town changed, and not slowly.
In 2010, the county put in new zoning laws. “Mixed-use development,” they called it. I got letters. Offers. Pressure. “Prime location,” they said. “Just off the bypass.” They didn’t care that the bypass killed our downtown. They just wanted land. Mine.
I held out. For years, I held out.
But Janie passed in 2018. Cancer. Quiet and cruel. After that, I couldn’t mow all five acres on my own. Couldn’t pick like I used to. Ellie had moved to St. Louis. Her husband’s job. I still sent her homemade jam every Christmas, even if the jars got smaller each year.
Then came the final letter. Eminent domain. Said the land was being seized for “economic improvement.” They gave me a check and a deadline. I remember standing at the kitchen sink, holding that paper like it was a death certificate.
The demolition crew showed up on a Thursday. I stood out front with a thermos and a folding chair, watching them tear up forty years in an afternoon. They didn’t even hesitate. Machines don’t.
They knocked down the swing set first. Then the shed. Then the trees.
One of the men—maybe twenty-five—found an old photo nailed to the inside of the tool shed. It was sun-bleached but still clear: me, Janie, and baby Ellie standing in the orchard, all smiles and dirt-stained jeans. He looked at it, then looked at me. Said nothing. Just set it on the porch step before walking away.
I still have that photo.
They paved it all. Put up one of those dollar stores with blinking signs and bad music playing through the speakers in the ceiling. They sell off-brand detergent, fake flowers, and snacks wrapped in foil. It smells like plastic and tired air conditioning.
But every time I drive by—because I still live right next door—I swear I can smell the apples. Just faint, like memory.
Last week, a little girl came skipping out of the store with her mom. She dropped her juice box in the parking lot. Bent to pick it up and looked right at me. “Did this used to be a farm?” she asked, out of nowhere.
Her mom hushed her and pulled her away.
But I just nodded. “It used to be more than that,” I whispered.
I don’t think she heard me.
Some mornings, I sit on the porch with a mug of coffee and look out over the blacktop. There’s a crack near the loading dock where a weed pushed through. I know what it is—wild apple rootstock. Probably from a seed the wind buried deep and forgot.
I don’t cut it.
I let it grow.
Because maybe—just maybe—something real still remembers how to fight its way back.
Some roots don’t die quietly; they wait for silence—then rise again, right through the concrete.
“You’re trespassing,” the boy said, holding a Nerf gun like it meant something.
He couldn’t have been more than ten, all knees and freckles, standing by the crack where the apple rootstock had pushed through the concrete. His little chest puffed out like a bantam rooster. I hadn’t heard him coming.
I looked down at the weed—well, tree now. It had grown two more inches since last week. A stubborn little thing. One green leaf. One blistered brown.
“Is that your tree?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “But it remembers me.”
He scrunched his face, confused. “You talk weird.”
“Only when I’m listening.”
He thought about that, then lowered the toy gun. “My mom works in the store. I hang out in the breakroom sometimes. They don’t let kids back there, but they like me.”
I nodded. “That so?”
“Yup.” He kicked at a gum wrapper with his shoe. “They said this used to be a farm.”
“It was.”
“Did you kill animals?”
“No,” I smiled. “Only weeds. And the occasional wasp nest.”
“Cool,” he said, and sat cross-legged on the curb like he planned to stay.
His name was Wyatt. Said it like he was proud of it. Said his dad was “somewhere in Ohio, probably,” and his mom worked double shifts. He liked skateboards, hated pickles, and didn’t believe in ghosts—“but I believe in ghosts of places,” he added. That made me sit up straighter.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, plucking a dandelion from the edge of the curb, “sometimes I think places remember things even if people forget. Like my grandma’s house. She died last year, but the porch still smells like her lotion.”
I didn’t answer. Just nodded, slow. I knew that smell. Knew that feeling.
He came back the next day. And the next. Always around 4 p.m., when the sun dipped behind the roof of the store and the pavement stopped burning. He’d bring juice boxes, sometimes an extra one for me, though I preferred coffee.
One afternoon, he brought a notebook.
“I’m drawing the orchard,” he said. “From your stories.”
I looked down. Crayon sketches—wobbly trees with red circles, a crooked ladder, a tiny swing.
“That’s your wife,” he said, pointing. “The one who smelled like apples.”
I swallowed. “That’s a good likeness.”
He smiled.
—
Word got around.
An older couple from the neighborhood stopped by one Sunday. “We used to pick apples here with our grandkids,” the woman said, voice thick. “We thought it was all gone.”
I showed them the rootstock. They touched it like it was holy. Told me they still had a jar of our jam in the freezer, labeled in Janie’s handwriting.
A week later, a man came with his daughter. Then a young mom. Then a pair of teenagers with disposable cameras. They stood where the rows used to be and took pictures of nothing—because nothing was left but stories and a weed.
But that crack in the pavement? It became something else.
A shrine, maybe. Or a wound that wouldn’t close.
I found a note tucked under a rock one morning. It read:
“We were married here under the trees. You gave us cider. Thank you.”
No name.
I taped it to my porch rail with twine and clothespins.
Soon, others followed. Notes, photos, drawings. One kid wrote, “I never saw your orchard but I believe in it.”
Believe.
That word landed hard.
—
Then one day the manager of the dollar store came knocking.
“Sir, you’re drawing attention.”
I was leaning on my rake, dirt on my jeans, coffee in hand. “That so?”
“You’ve got people loitering. They’re leaving trash, blocking the loading dock, taking photos. It’s interfering with deliveries.”
“They’re not hurting anything.”
“They’re not buying anything either.”
I looked past her, past the metal doors and buzzing lights, at the crack in the pavement. The little tree now had five leaves. One was turning red.
“I’ll talk to them,” I said.
She gave me a look. “Corporate’s not happy. Just… be careful.”
That night, someone yanked the rootstock from the ground.
I found it early the next morning—limp and broken, its base snapped clean.
Wyatt was there too. He didn’t say a word. Just sat beside it, fists clenched in his lap.
“Who would do that?” he finally whispered.
“Someone who forgot how to remember,” I said.
We buried it in my backyard. I let him hold the shovel.
Later that evening, under the porch light, I taped a new sign to the rail.
“They took the tree. But not the root.”
