The next morning, the parking lot was full again—but not with customers.
They brought pots. Soil. Buckets of mulch. Someone rolled up with a trailer full of saplings from a nursery in the next county. A teenage girl passed out stickers that read “Remember the Orchard.”
And in the middle of it all stood Wyatt, clutching a sign he made himself:
“Some things are worth growing again.”
No one asked for permission. They just started planting.
Not in rows, but in a circle. A wide, uneven ring of apple trees around the edge of the lot. Half of them probably wouldn’t survive the heat or the salt or the noise. But they were there.
One woman brought seeds from her great-grandfather’s Arkansas orchard. Another man, a veteran, offered cuttings from a crabapple tree he said had outlived two hurricanes.
A retired teacher organized a rotation to water them. Teenagers showed up after school with garden hoses and YouTube tutorials. Wyatt’s mom, off her shift and bone-tired, brought lemonade and paper cups.
Someone played Willie Nelson from a Bluetooth speaker. An old couple danced on the sidewalk.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t planned.
But it was alive.
And one afternoon, the manager came again. This time, with a camera crew behind her.
“You should see this,” she whispered. “We’re going viral.”
I didn’t care about viral.
I cared that a tree stood again.
That folks were looking each other in the eye again.
That Wyatt brought me an apple he’d drawn in crayon and said, “One day, I’ll plant a whole forest.”
—
They never did bulldoze again.
The trees stayed.
The store eventually put a bench out front. A plaque too: “In Memory of the Orchard. In Honor of the Roots.”
I sit there sometimes, with coffee in hand, watching strangers become neighbors again. Watching Wyatt grow up.
And in the spring, when the petals fall like quiet snow, I swear I hear Janie laughing in the wind.
Maybe they paved the orchard—but they didn’t bury the soul that bloomed in its place.
