I was never too fond of heights at the best of times. Everybody else in the family, however, seemed to think it was up to me, being the youngest and most agile, to climb the crabapple tree and pick the fruit others couldn’t reach.
Clinging desperately to a little branch already heavily laden with fruit, I heard bits of encouragement filtering up through the leaves.
“One thing about kids. They don’t mind falling.”
“And if they do get hurt, they heal real fast.”
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One afternoon I had a better idea. I asked Dad if he would load an empty gasoline barrel onto the two-wheel trailer and haul it down to the orchard with the tractor. If he would just park it under the apple tree, I could then climb into the trailer, scramble up onto the barrel and pick crabapples in comfort. Not only that, but when I was finished, I wouldn’t have to lug all those heavy apples up the path to the house. They could be delivered right to the door with the tractor and trailer.
As the apples thumped into the empty milk pails (who cared about bruising them) I began to wonder who had planted this tree in the first place. In my youthful imagination, I pictured an army of Johnny Appleseeds marching through rural Manitoba, leaving behind them a legacy of apple blossoms and belly aches. Every rural backyard seemed to have at least one crabapple tree and the best fruit was always on the highest branches.
I was not yet finished picking when Dad decided he needed the tractor, so he propped the trailer hitch on a block of wood and drove away. Standing up there on my perch, I heard him open the orchard gate, but I never heard it close.
Within minutes I was surrounded by our young and enthusiastic herd of hogs.
As long as they rooted around on the ground and I stayed up on the gasoline barrel, things were fine and dandy. But then one fine fat hog decided he had to scratch himself on the trailer hitch. He rubbed so vigorously he knocked it off the block of wood and upset my apple cart.
I hit the ground surrounded by 15 hogs, all crunching my spilled crabapples and poking at me curiously with their wet snouts, the apple juice dribbling down their jowls.
Hobbling up to the house for sympathy and salve, and with the latest Sunday school lesson still fresh in my mind, I “described to them how it had happened … and all about the swine.” And being more of a sinner than a saint, I declared I would someday get even with those “stupid pigs.”
And so I have.
From that day to this I have eaten pork chops and applesauce with smug satisfaction.
