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There is an ancient apple tree at the very center
of the Marlboro campus, one of several bearing
witness to the orchard and farm that lived here
once, before the arrival of students and musicians.
Only a few steps from the dining hall, where today
music and meals, dances and skits, discussions and
daydreams send out their sounds, aromas, lights, and
intangibles, the apple tree has stood, for longer than
most of us may well have to live, as a silent, patient,
observant, self-possessed, perennially fertile presence
through Vermont’s seasons of extremes and through the
transformations of its surroundings, ever undiminished
in its vitality and the welcoming of its open arms.
Resembling more the timeless, gnarled, intrepid olive
trees of Gethsemane, its outspread branches have
kindly held generations of climbing-happy children,
served as the setting for photographs of young and old,
and fed the adventurous who taste its unsolicited fruit.
Untended, unpruned, year after year its nascent apples,
unremarked at first, quietly ripen as a summer’s music
continues, as if to mirror, encourage, and document
our own ripening efforts nearby. Its only sounds come
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apple tree
by Philipp naegele
from fruit as it drops to the ground in August, weeping
with and applauding the music that, like the apples,
is the fruit of a summer’s dedication. The cider aroma
of apples on the ground mingles then with the sounds
of instruments and voices, lingering suspended in the
atmosphere.
The apple tree is unlike others of its kind. It has not
only risen upward, but has sent out trunk-thick limbs
horizontally, close to the ground – limbs that have rerooted
and can sustain the weight of ice and snow, of the
canopy’s ever expanding reach, of climbers and crops and
time. It has even survived a major amputation recently.
A horizontal stump presents to our unsettling sight, like
a veteran amputee, the evidence of unpeaceful times. Its
scars of age, its determination still further to spread its
wings, to live on, re-root, and produce new generations
speaks to the continuing fertility of the vision of those
once re-rooting uprooted idealists from post-war Europe
whose heartbreaking beautiful music it first heard some
sixty years ago drifting across to where it then already
stood, ready to receive, treasure, and reciprocate down
to this very day.