by Sondra Falck

Created on: August 13, 2010

The Day of the Apples

There is a kind of magic in the way a quiet, dark night and a stretch of highway can wrap around you like a warm blanket. I had a conversation with an old friend last night. Usually our conversations are LOUD, filled with bawdy laughter and fragrant loads of bullshit. Last night’s words were full of quiet perspective. I sat in my bedroom soaking up the calm of my silent, sleeping house and my friend drove in the quiet, dark away from a funeral. It was a night for perspective.

We all have those relationships in our lives that fall under the “complicated” category. Those relationships that are steeped in pain, old transgressions, scars that never quite heal, and distance. When we think of these people, our pain is all we feel and it’s so hard to step out of that puddle of hurt to the place that lies beyond it, common ground. Even in the most battle scarred relationships there are moments of wonderful. Those moments get lost though, as we simmer in the juice of being right and justified.

Sometimes it takes the quiet words of an old friend to push all that crap out of the way and bring to light a few lost moments of wonderful.


To call my relationship with my mother “strained” would be a vast understatement. To put it mildly it was laced with violence. Today we have no relationship. I don’t talk to her, she doesn’t talk to me and we both pretend that we’re fine with that. Most days I know I am right, justified for maintaining the distance. I could give you a thousand reasons, complete with tales of a thousand cruel and pain filled incidents to back me up.
But I won’t.

I was fourteen and probably the ugliest, gangliest girl in the history of adolescent awkwardness. I felt surrounded by ugly, in the mirror, in the angry words and sharp slaps that rained down on my days like razors. Everyday was just ugly. But there was this one day where for a moment, I was just her daughter, and she was just my mom and for that moment there was no pain. It was just us and a kitchen full of apples.

I don’t recall where the apples came from. My brain is hazy on that detail but I would guess that we had gone to an orchard because the kitchen was cluttered with buckets full of apples. The scent of them filled the house. It was early morning; Dad and my brothers had gone out for a day’s work in the fields. The window above the sink was open, letting in the crisp fall air to wash over our skin.

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