Memory, Meet Orchard.

A long time ago, when our father was the age we were then, people took the trains for everything and roads were built for bicycles, not the awkward, shambling cars that gasped in pain up the hill from Fort Spring to The Orchard.

Back then, we thought it was called The Orchard because every township had The Store, or, The Diner. This forest of regimented trees full of fruit should be a similar fortunate thing, wonderful food within every ten square miles. Nothing else made sense.

My sister and I marked our growth each fall with how easily we filled the trunk; how well we could reach the branches, and how our skills improved in finding the best of the best. We practiced on the trees Dad planted in the backyard. We confessed to being a little afraid of his mother's enormous old apple, hollow as sycamore and knobbed like arthritis. Woodpeckers drilled holes over every exposed inch of bark. To this day I have never seen another tree so full of pocks. Those apples were tiny, red, and stingy but she stubbornly hung on to them for reasons we didn't understand. She did the same with the pear tree around the corner and it produced pear-flavored yellow balls of grit and stone. As a very young child I wondered if she needed the tree to hang up her bird feeder.

We climbed Dad's younger, smaller, safer (and in our minds, saner) trees. We searched for bugs and the swelling capsules of flowers as they slowly woke up under the weight of spring weather. Robins loved apple trees for their nests, and there was no telling what insects you'd find hiding in the branches. At the bottom the morels might come out in spring for Mom's soups, and the violets Grandma brought with her from down the mountaintop when she married Grandfather was part of the secret wealth. I can still see those violets glowing ivory white against the green castoffs from the trees, flowers big as a Kennedy half-dollar with lavender whiskers.

"Pink Pearl," Sis pulled it off a small tree that never, ever seemed to change. It had goldfinch-yellow skin but when you bit into it, the flesh filled with pink, raspberry-flavored juice and dripped like blood into your hand.

"Christmas." I held up six in my hands--they were small and flat, the size of the huge wooden buttons the older women wore on their heavy wool coats. In the old days, we had been told, they were made into Christmas wreaths.

"Wolf River." Sis had lucked out: a branch had the unripe green ones (for pies and preserves) but the sunnier open branches had the first of the red-pinstripe ripe globes (dessert apples now; eat out of hand). Huge things, just eight filled our bushel-basket. A Wolf River apple was proof of a gentle spring, for they bloomed early and died early against the scattershot frosts that hit the Greenbrier Watershed. Summers scorched us from the north-flowing New River, and Winters blistered us with dry, painful cold for the mountains were shaped to catch the Boreal winds and sweep them like balls in a pinball machine, through the valleys. The trees that lived were survivors.

"Jonathan." The younger we were, the more we ate them sour and young. Older, we found a lot less stomach upset with the sweeter, easier to chew fruit. Jonathans had acne every year: cedar rust from the wild trees in the woods.

"Cornish Gilliflower." Sis's love of Shakespeare guaranteed she would know this apple. It was a chitling; a word nearly forgotten in the outside world but meant an early apple. But we grew tall and she moved to Chaucer just so she could quote, 'the first apple and the hext' (highest).

When you're young you can eat every apple you name. That's a skill that goes away with age.

The Orchard was in Monroe County, where the sinkhole farmland grew most of the apples for the Eastern Seaboard back when you grew to eat and ate what you grew. Every tree was a family tree, packed with history, who brought it, who planted it, what you did with it. Three apples were found in West Virginia: The smooth skinned, white-freckled Golden Delicious, the Grimes Golden (found on the Grimes farm in Brooke County; mother of the Golden Delicious) and the one lost to time, the Guyandotte (after the river). We ate the Golden Delicious out of hand, shuddered at the so-called Red Delicious that had been bred to the size of a potato and the flavor and texture of sour green cardboard. We learned from the Grimes: they were ugly. All of them. But the flavor was so good. We laughed when we picked them; no two apples on the tree were shaped the same (lumpy caulkins like flint nodules in the limestone, or an applehead doll without the doll. They were ugly but we valued them; they had worth and when you are young and uncertain it helps to see that what is beautiful may not be so good after you see what's inside.

The Guyandotte was a mystery, a mythic poem. Small and plump, a dusty rose color and a taste like it was already cider. Found on the banks of a river we'd never seen, it was a surprise to grow up and learn it was re-discovered; it hadn't died, but it had fallen out of favor and that was the same as death when you own an orchard and men who have never seen your face pay you per box of what they want you to grow for them. Mysterious people roamed Appalachia. Apple-hunters. Apple-archaeologists. Finding lost fruit trees; saving them from extinction.

When our father was a child there were thousands of apples species in the world. But prices were shallow, inflated for the prettiest and most uniform of shape. Did flavor even matter, we wondered? Even the Golden Delicious tasted like stale, crumbled sugar-water once bought in the store out of season and scrubbed of its identity in climate-controlled warehouses. Cookbooks added flour to apples that had no business in a pie. Instead of using the right apple for the job, a few apples were used, and pounded, pressed, leavened, sprayed with chemicals and altered. The blueberry chips in our cereal, we learned, were actually apple bits soaked in flavoring. The July Transparents behind the house were ready to eat before the back-to-school sales. Pale yellow-green, skins so thin you could see through them. Tart as sour apple candy, but happy to take your seasonings, ready to do what you wanted.

An apple a day kept the doctor away, but it brought the hungry in droves. Mom and her sister, mother, and cousin laughed and canned endless shelves: apple jelly, clear as new honey. Apple jelly made mint jelly; glazes for meats, usually pork and chicken. When you were down to nothing you could at least depend on an apple harvest. Mom was weary of apple jelly by the time we were old enough to help: her jars were gifts to put in holiday baskets, birthday announcements, or added to a pan of biscuits when a family was in mourning. She was willing to try any jelly if it wasn't apple. A bland, neutral sweetener bound foods together but it didn't stand out for a woman who, thank to a childhood injury, couldn't taste a lot of things.

There were apples cooked down slowly in a slowly simmering crockpot turned the kitchen into a cinnamon factory, for apple butter fed your heart before it fed your belly. Fried apple pies, black with spices. Apple leather, dark as mud but melted tangy stripes on the tongue and on a cold fall day the oven door was set to its lowest heat, a wooden spoon propping it open an inch, and peeled doughnuts of apple slices dried, ever so slowly, overnight. Applesauce replaced fats in Aunt Marie's muffins when her diet had to change; applesauce made our quickbreads, cakes, and sat on the side next to the ham or pork. The scraps fed chickens, hogs, and the pile of compost. What wasn't eaten was looted by the yellow-jackets. Trimmed branches were tossed into the brushpile but that was because we lived in fatter times; apple chips fed the smokers, and mulch fed earth grown thin and sour from too overuse.

Dad remembered the boys from the farm on the way to town. So poor, but they carried apples, 'green as poison, sweet as honey!' Fowlwaters, they were called and it took writing directly to antique nurseries to learn they were Fallawaters, birthed in Pennsylvania before the Mexican-American wars. A local couple sold me a tree. They sold me a box of an unrealistically green crop. It was the one time in my life I was confident of the present I gave my father. It sat in the basement to 'blett' to finish ageing, softening with a new flavor.

The orchard's rows shrank as we grew; the trees became elderly, and grapes began slipping through the edges instead of the wild tumbles of bittersweet. We bought fruit inside the old barn, fed by long-melted railcars to the depot in Union. As a child my ears hammered with the roar of bearings and rollers sorting, jogging, and filing waterfalls of apples like documents into hard cardboard crates. Now the machines were silent; not enough revenue; not enough buyers with the supermarkets fed through trucks on the I-64. You paid and picked, or picked and paid, the scales weighing in what you found. A gift shop opened in the back and shelves hung bulging with ugly apples glowing inside bottles of fruit ketchups, sauces, batter cakes baked inside jars and heat-sealed to keep. The smell of ancient apples came out of the unsealed planks of wall and floor, as if to remind the new foods where they had come from.

Monroe County sinkholes, sweet lime earth, karstic caverns full of water feeding the roots and soft rain. The apples of fall were packed in dry maple leaves and kept in the basement away from the potatoes Dad sprinkled with lime. Monroe Country was rich with growth; if you could afford to escape the choking fumes and heat from the cities, you fled to a small spot in the country here, no matter how small it was. It was a chance to breathe; to be something else. Mother was one of those families, meeting Dad as he was running the small post office.

One day Mom was driving, and we were all grown up. There were wildlings along the sides of The Orchard; seeds sprouted without the help of humans, but they were allowed to grow. Wildlings were how our famous apples were born. Her father had been driving them all on this road, she said. He pulled over and plucked a few wildling apples hanging off the fence. Her mother had exploded in condemnation, told him he was stealing and she wasn't going to have any part of it. She wouldn't stop preaching at him. Mom kept driving as the dust shifted lazy clouds past our tires. Her voice was always soft when she remembered things; like she was reading out loud a book in a church. "And Dad said, when we divorce, do you want to live here or in Charleston?"

The answer to that was, here. They stayed here.

I moved away. I didn't want to. It wasn't safe to go to places I loved; someone knew those places and could be waiting to find me there. I never saw the orchard again, and my family only once. My daughter has my mother's eyes, the shade of jade and silver of apple leaves before they turn, when the summer is softening around the edges.

This time of year I remember Dad the most. The economy moved on to bigger, better things. The fruit cars under the C&O ended, and the rails became the main street. A ghost town, Fort Spring, for a ghostly orchard. We had been sitting on the porch with Fallawaters. I saw the road in front of us; Dad saw phantom trains on their way to Clifton Forge and the Great Depression. I asked him what it was like when the apples were in. He remembered the endless boxes of produce, their sweet-hay smell, getting sent on their way to the big cities where apple sellers tried not to die as they made a living.

"And at night," he said, "you could sit here and watch the trains go past, watch the people inside through the windows in the front of the car. They would be waited on, and eat on fine china, and silverware, and the lights would flash on everything.

"And then they'd pass, and you'd see the people on the other end of the cars, with nothing to eat."

Frost was pulling down the corners of the air around us, and that was when I made a connection: Dad ate stubbornly ate apples even when any other fruit was available so he could feed those farmers, whoever they were.

And though he loved to eat a rabbit at someone's table, he had stopped shooting them years before I was born. When the winters were at their hardest, everyone else shot the cottontails gnawing the bark off their fruit trees, but Dad merely stretched a wire cage around each small tree, and left piles of prunings for them to hide in. The older trees are now like his mother's scary old woman-tree in the yard, full of suckers. The rabbits and deer nibble them, and survive. All of this happens behind the house, where his neighbors are unlikely to see him and laugh. And in this, I finally see why his mother put up with trees grown past their years of human use. It was not tolerance, but a quiet joy in having enough to eat that trees could be kept even when she and her children could not eat the crops. Directly or indirectly, there is a payment we must acknowledge to the world we share and an old tree is how they let their yards lie fallow.

Dad's voice echoes in my son's when I ask him what apples I should buy. "An apple's an apple." He says this not in dismissal, but loyalty. And indeed, he will eat any one he is given, even the atrocious Red 'Delicious'. He laughs at my selective tastes, and I remember that we may have shaped the apple, but it has shaped us, fairly.

Last week my mother confessed over the phone what we all knew: "I was so sick of apple jelly." She grew quiet again, thinking her words out ahead as if she was sewing them into a cloth. "But you know, I think I could eat some now."