Lake Bolsena. Primavera, 2020
The sparse, spritely chirrup of Little Bittern declares bitter Winter’s flight. Piano strings bare notes of Bach, hesitantly, then with haste. The sound – any sound at all, but this sound, here – slackens Morning’s crisp breath, worries Dew from its cradle, there in the grass blade’s curve.
Sunlight beams upon an outhouse wall; it is cragged and patched with stone, lime, stucco. Here, Shadow’s silhouette interrupts. Fine nose, delicate chin. Then a bounty of apples, piled in Grandma’s silver bowl – not for Sunday best, rather Tuesday’s salad. And Shadow leans with intrigue, head tilts, mouth falls, led by Curiosity. With unruly holly and spindled sprigs as backdrop, Shadow becomes Girl.
Girl bites Apple, a faint furrow dances across her brow. It is that kind of furrow, on the face of a girl that kind of age – its weight is unknown. Does she frown to deflect Sun’s glare? To deflect Mum’s idle chatter? Oh-ho, yes – she’s that kind of age. That age when Friend of Mum and Next-door Neighbour push her way books detailing the growth of breast buds and visits from Aunt Flo.
Girl is balancing, clumsily, between childhood and adulthood. And so, as Girl bites Apple, is this her expulsion from Eden, her loss of innocence? Her irreversible step from childhood to adulthood?
Of course, Girl herself might be an apple, the fruit of generations before her. Is she condemned to bear the seed of Original Sin? She, that apple, bows a bough that extends from the Tree of Sisterhood. This branch reaches toward northern Italy, weathered by the mountain rains, worn by those modern afflictions of burnout and neck pain. But there, slightly nearer to the trunk, a sturdier branch hangs over northern England – suspended beneath the waning moon, in some period before electricity, and above the warns and wails of washerwomen and wives.
England. Waning moon, sometime before electricity
Why, don’t pick them apples, my dear! Why, don’t pick the apples ‘neath the waning moon, lest the shrumple up! Leave them be, girl, leave them for the faeries. Why, girl, yer nearing that age, aren’t yeh? Take this here apple, this Allan apple. Polish it good, good and proper. And place it ‘neath your pillow this night and hope t’dream of the man yeh shall marry.
But oh, if you can’t wait ‘til dawn, take that knife - the good one yer ma saves for potatoes. And peel – careful, now – peel that apple clean, in one singl’ unbroken strand o’ peel. And as you so do, repeat:
“St Simon and St Jude on you I intrude,
By this paring I hope to discover,
Without any delay to tell me this day,
The first letter of my own true lover.”
And turn, three times, my dear, and throw that peel over yer shoulder – gently, now, not t’ rough. The peel’ll make the shape of the name of your groom t’be as it strikes the floor. But watch, if it flies apart, or yeh can’t make hide n’ hare, mercy you. For that shall make yeh spinster for evermore!
Here, the apples are more robust: they must be cooked before consumption. And so, their destiny is predetermined; they are resigned to the fate of pie filling or pulped sauce. Must those fruits of the Sisterhood Tree meet similarly inevitable ends? Can the apple only ever fall towards spinsterhood or marriage? Can the apple ever fall far from the tree? Well, in northern Italy, the apple falls freely through air thinned by altitude and cleared by several waves of feminism.
Lake Bolsena. Primavera, 2020
From that bite Girl chews, eyes closed, face cast in bleached light. And as her eyes open, a smile flits across her lips. Her brow is, for now, unburdened by the frown heaved at the peel that forms no name. Girl’s buoyant expression gives way to pure brightness, and then to the rolling rhythm of Neruda’s Ode a la manzana. He speaks purposefully, with certainty, of the experience of eating an apple:
Cuando mordemos
Tu redonda inocencia
Volvemos
Por un instante
A ser
También recién creadas criaturas:
Aún tenemos algo de manzana.
When we bite
Your round innocence
We too return
For a moment
To the state
Of the newborn:
There’s still some apple in us all.
Oh, the refreshing relief! Here, for Neruda, that bite does not disappear innocence, rather it returns such innocence. And so, as Girl bites Apple, may she sidestep that irreversible step from childhood to adulthood? Not that she remain, forever, on that merry-go-round of childhood – instead, may she proceed from childhood to adulthood without ceremony nor expectation. And may Apple be, to Girl, not a vessel of skittish hope nor of uncertain promise, rather one of revivifying joy, sure and true.