Three Perfect Apples for the Taking
When the world lurched to a stop, I discovered the power of one human to lift another.
Three months after the end of life as we knew it, my dog and I crossed a playing field where no one played anymore. I was aiming to make time but came under the spell of a marvel. The water fountain, where water was not on offer, held three apples burnished by the morning sun. Whoever placed them there had the eye of an artist and the heart of a Good Samaritan.
Had I passed a little earlier or later, I’d have missed the apples, nestled in their makeshift bowl. They disappeared within the hour. I snapped a photo, thinking it was the apples that called, “You must remember.” Looking back, I know it was the kindness they embodied. Hungry people had been roaming my neighborhood. Those apples nourished someone. Five years after Covid gripped the world, the very thought of them nourishes me.
That June morning in 2020, I’d been walloped by a nameless hunger—for astonishment, for beauty, for connection with passers-by who used to greet my dog and ruffle his fur. Now they swerved to avoid us, eyes blank and fearful above their masks. Flyers shouted from lampposts and boarded-up windows, “Stay the fuck home.”
If anyone can thrive hunkered down at a screen, it’s an introverted writer with a mission: pinning her corner of history to a Facebook page. I raced to capture the tsunami of dread and befuddlement— my first jagged DIY haircut, the torment of keeping my hands off my wildly itching face. My most colorful bra repurposed as a mask and modeled for housebound friends in a manic stab at humor.
On the morning of the apples, I posted my photo and noticed a detail I had missed. Maple seeds encircled the fountain and brushed the fruit. Little wishbones, that tender green that vanishes with spring. Fifty people liked my impromptu still life; a bevy of them shared it. My apples were seeding Facebook with the generous impulse of a stranger anyone might know—or become.
You don’t hear much about the nerve-jangling strangeness of deepest and darkest Covid. I guess no one wants to remember. If not for my torrent of pandemic posts, which today read like an abandoned novel, I wouldn’t remember telling my husband of close to 50 years, “I’m falling into a depression.” My old enemy. The last time it swallowed me, I kept picturing a bathtub and a razor blade. We needed each other. Please, let me stay well.
I can count on Paul to find a new angle on my crisis of the moment. I wasn’t ill, he said, only grieving the loss of every social devotion that used to shape my day or swell my heart. No more kibitzing with my barista, my Pilates gang and the produce vendor who always knocked a dollar off my bill. My anguish was a bond I shared with every other reeling human. The friend who called lockdown “a pole through the heart.” The cousin who remarked, of lifelong confidantes pushing 80, “I’ve just realized I may never see them again.” The Facebook friend whose photos of her household, glowing with the sheen of monied comfort, gave way to a black-and-white selfie streaked with tears.
A loner my entire life, I’d never known such kinship with so many. We were all cracking. And through the fissures there emerged a startling tenderness toward one another.
Facebook became a virtual bulletin board connecting fresh-baked bread with the hungry, drivers with the housebound, sewers of face masks with people who had none. I liked to think Paul and I could solve our own problems. Then our dog began to whimper and sigh at the worst possible time: quarantine. How would we get Casey to the vet?
Okay, Facebook. You’re on.
I’d no sooner posted my SOS than offers of help poured in. “I can drive over,” said friends I’d never met. Within 15 minutes, an old colleague shot me a message. She and her husband, a short walk away, would be glad to do the honors. Just two hours passed before Casey was treated and curled up at home—all thanks to Jaclyn and Jacob. They couldn’t catch a movie or host friends for dinner, but they could make my family’s day. No wonder their smiles looked so bright. I’m not a hugger—just ask anyone who’s seen me shy away from an embrace. And yet, five years on, I still want to hug those two.
Writing my way through Covid, I thought the story would end in the shining realm of Normal. Yet most humans throughout history never stayed there for long, if they had the good fortune to arrive at all. The crop failed, the enemy raped and slaughtered, the plague laid waste to the known world. In Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, there is no such thing as Normal. Why should my time and place get a pass?
On a Monday afternoon in the first Covid winter, I took a break from writing to scroll through Facebook and landed on a spectacle so inconceivably appalling, it froze me in my chair. A gallows on Capitol Hill: real, not a dystopian movie. A police officer fighting for his life against a mob of armed rioters: real. When order was restored, I trusted we were bound for Normal.
I’ve stopped hoping Normal is around the next bend. In the age of chaos, cruelty and revenge, January 6, 2021 keeps sprouting new fire-breathing heads like a mythical beast made real. Yet the courage and conviction of those who are plain fed up is no less real. As I write to you, people are taking to the streets at more than 1,300 “Hands Off” rallies across the U.S. and around the world. Public action gives me hope, but so do private gestures that will never make news, only memories.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of the natural world, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” It’s no less true of human hearts united by the urgent, obliterating fact of what was once beyond imagining. When I remember Covid, what stands out is not disinfecting doorknobs for fear of risking death. It’s three apples left for the taking—one image from multitude of small consolations that pulled me through.
Last week I shared an elevator cab with a squirming five-year-old and his mother. I don’t know how to save democracy, but I know the allure of elevator buttons to kids of a certain size. Would he like to press eight for me?
He stood on tiptoe with the proud grin of a kid who knew his numbers and knew mine was within stretching distance. Big people with mean, shriveled hearts, are doing terrible things I can’t change. But I can help a little person learn to be kind. And here’s the best part: He thought he was only having fun.
How do you remember Covid—destroyer of all good things, unlikely and unwelcome teacher, or somewhere in between? If Normal is not to be, what should replace it? In an age of chaos, what steadies your soul?
Take it away, Amazement Seekers. The floor is yours. And so are all my other posts. If this one caught your fancy, take a virtual tour of the kindest sights in my neighborhood. Or head over here to read about the kindness I didn’t offer to someone in need. He’s been on my mind ever since, nudging me to do better.
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Such a beautiful piece. Your words are so powerful, so full of rhythm. Thank you. xo
You give words to something I’ve been unable to identify: thinking that there’d be a return to “normal” after the pandemic was over. But normal never returned, not even a “new” normal. Thank you.
In the past few days, been deleting most of my Instagram photos for a variety of reasons. I came to the photos I posted during the lockdown and have decided to keep them posted, if only to serve as a visual reminder of what things felt like, looked like as “normal” got left behind.