The Orchard

Peter had always felt his orchard to be a place of peace, a sanctuary from the noise. The neat rows of apple trees offered him a sense of control and order that his marriage, and much of his life no longer provided. It had been years since he’d last felt the kind of passion he now felt budding, no blooming!—years since he really questioned the choices he’d made. Something had shifted when Matthew began working in the orchard that season, and Peter found himself haunted by the ache of youth, a longing that felt as distant as it was impossible to reject.

Matthew was twenty, a summer hire from Craigslist, with the lean build and casual grace that made his movements effortless. He had a way of leaning against the ladder, catching a bit of shade, his shirt playing with the breeze.   Peter watched him without meaning to, feeling as though he were witnessing something elusive.  Peter was old enough to know what was going on.  (So was Matthew.)

Peter told himself it was harmless—what was the harm in admiring youth? But as the days passed, Peter found his thoughts drifting more frequently toward Matthew. Curiosity was edging toward obsession. The youth’s laughter, the way he wiped the sweat from his brow, even the way he hollered to Peter in that easy, non self conscious voice—it all reminded Peter of something he’d lost.

At night, in the quiet of the house that he shared with Katherine, his wife of twenty years, the memories of times gone by came unbidden. He’d married Katherine out of practicality, not love. It was a decision made in his early thirties, when the idealism of his twenties had already faded into the realization that he needed stability. Katherine was sharp, ambitious—more a partner than a lover—and together, they had built a life. But as the years wore on, the passion that had once burned for something more was snuffed out.  Peter had come to accept that perhaps life was meant to be more ordinary than exciting.  

Now, Matthew’s presence in the orchard was like a spark in California wildfire season. Watching the young man, Peter couldn’t help but wonder:  had he given up too soon? Should he have fought harder to hike the peak rather than take the short walking trail? It was natural for him to turn to philosophy when he felt an overwhelming challenge surfacing. He opened up his new edition of Kierkegaard: "Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, and you will also regret it."  A choice made in youth always carried a shadow.  He hadn’t thought much about regret before, but now, it gnawed at him. What had he lost when he’d chosen Katherine? What future could have been?

One evening, Peter sat in the orchard after Matthew had gone, a bottle of wine half empty on the table. The sun was about to set--the grass, the trees golden in the light.  He watched the shadows of the trees stretch longer and thin, their stillness mocking his own restless spirit. He could still see Matthew, smell Matthew’s damp perspiration. He hadn’t spoken with him more than the usual polite requests and banter, but that didn’t matter, he decided. There was a connection.

Perhaps it wasn’t Matthew himself that he longed for—it was what he represented: youth, potential, the unfixed nature of life that he had once held in his own hand like the season’s first apple ready to be tasted.

"Youth is in itself a kind of permission for recklessness." This evening, he was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life.  Yes, yes. We all know that, he agreed with the philosopher.   Mathew was that recklessness embodied, a permission to live with abandon.  Was it possible to live that way again, even now, even at his age? Was it madness to think that those possibilities hadn’t vanished entirely, that he could still act with the wild turn of youth?

He didn’t know the answer, but he felt the pull.  It scared him, and he went in to dinner.

“Apple tree” by Gustav Klimt

The next morning, Peter found himself walking to the orchard earlier than usual. Matthew was already there, digging an irrigation channel.  As Peter approached, Matthew smiled, a simple, casual gesture that made something inside Peter squeak like the horn of John Coltrane.

“Good morning, Mr. Donegger,” Matthew said, setting down the shovel and wiping his brow. “Beautiful morning.”

Peter nodded, his throat tight. “It is.”

"Youth full of grace, force, fascination,” Whitman wrote.  "Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?"

As the boy picked up the shovel again and moved away, Peter watched him go, the knot of longing tightening further in his chest. The poetry from college days was coming strong.  In the early morning sunlight, he drifted to Rainer Maria Rilke: "Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

Was this just fear? Desire? Or something deeper—a need to recapture the life he had let slip away? He wasn’t sure. How could he take Rilke’s advice and love this thing inside him which he didn’t know how to name? He knew one thing: Matthew was the embodiment of something he could never have again.  That’s what hurt the most.

When he returned to the house, Katherine was fussing in the kitchen, her presence as solid and familiar as the oak chairs that surrounded the table. She glanced at him, her expression unreadable.

“Sleep ok?” she asked, her voice calm, detached.

“Yeah,” Peter replied, his thoughts still hanging with the apples, the rising summer heat, the possibilities he’d once held . . . and lost.

And as he sat down across from her in the same old chair, at the same old table, he realized: it wasn’t just Matthew that he longed for. It was the reckless defiance of becoming anything. Was it too late to live that way again?