Poems by Tanya E. E. E. Schmid

An Invitation to the Apple Harvest

by Tanya E. E. E. Schmid

From Canary Fall 2020

After spending six years on a permaculture farm north of the Swiss Alps near the glaciers of the Eiger North Face, Tanya now resides 600 meters lower in altitude, amidst palm trees on the Southern Riviera of Switzerland, along Lago Maggiore.

If you’re lucky, the sun will be shining but with just enough clouds at midday to keep the sweat out of your eyes and your tanned arms from peeling to pink. If you’re lucky, the crop will come in full like it did five years ago and, if so, almost certainly the fruit will be ripe, providing the kind of juiciness that is sweet and sour all at once. If you’re lucky, your helpers will show up early, a patchwork of eager faces.

Maybe you decided to start an organic farm when you turned forty. Maybe you quit your job as a dental hygienist or a second-grade teacher or a hairdresser when you realized no one was going to fix climate change for you. Maybe you started the farm right out of college with a degree in Organic Agriculture and money from the corner bank. Maybe you converted the dairy farm your folks had. Maybe you hadn’t planted a seed since kindergarten and you didn’t know if you would ever get this far. In any case, you took the leap. Maybe your partner still isn’t convinced, so they’ve kept their job for when profits are low. Maybe you’re hiring workers through the unemployment office. Maybe you have a huge family who all work the fields together in their spare time. Maybe you get help from the neighbors and they get free veggies. Or maybe you’re plowing it alone.

In the city, your work is invisible. There are produce-buyers and grocery-store shoppers who complain about prices but expect you to keep their shelves full, no matter what the weather. There are people who don’t know what it is like to rise before dawn to bend low in the May rains to hand-pick six hundred slugs off the broccoli or the lettuce so that you don’t have to use pesticides, who ignore the fact that pesticides kill everything from the slugs to the vital insects and healthy bacteria that keep the soil alive. In the city, it is often difficult to see the cycle, the connection between all things.

To be sure, not everyone can start a farm. To be sure, there are city-dwellers who are dedicated composters, who buy local and organic, who plant bee-friendly flowers on their balconies. To be sure, some sow edibles along sidewalks, turn their lawns into vegetable gardens, and help out at the nearest orchard. There are small pockets of people in the city who see beyond their hunger and their cravings. They see the sacredness of growing food. They understand what you do.

They understand that your back is stiff and your muscles ache and, yes, you have known hard physical labor. They understand how you work weekends and skip vacations because if you don’t things will die, how you learned to watch the clouds, to smell for rain, to read the intentions of the northern or westerly winds, to know the names of the trees that hold those winds at bay, to build swales and bury reservoirs to retain water wherever possible. They understand that nature can be murderous to your fields, wiping clean your months-long toil in an hour of hail, three days of hard rain or three weeks without. Lord knows.

But some people talk about environmental protection as something separate from their daily lives. You bury your hands in the cool earth of it every day. The city forgets. The non-profits spin the conversation away from doing good toward doing less harm. They know the city abhors sacrifice, dislikes inconvenience, so they give people a way out of the cycle, a way to relieve their guilt, to appease their fear of taking action, their fear of change – write a letter, vote or donate to save the bees or to ban the latest pesticide.

“All natural” is a cliché, overused and exhausted in our advertising, but the fact remains: becoming part of the natural cycle regenerates the body, renews the spirit. So many of us walk through the world without becoming a part of it. When you walk out onto your wheat field and the seed heads are nodding or the peaches in your orchard give slightly under your thumb or the peas in your garden rows have swollen to match the roundness of your finger, no matter how experienced you are, how many times you have done this, you can’t help but smile. These gifts are for you. For us.

In the city, tomorrow, you’ll be selling produce for a fraction of its worth. In the city, tomorrow, you’ll ignore their sighs and sideways glances, even though you’ve kept the smaller, damaged and irregular fruit for yourself. But in your orchard, today, none of that matters.

Today, the sun is shining and the grass is still wet and the wind is gentle. Today you’re lucky: the blossoms snuck past the late frost this spring and there were enough bees back in May to do the pollinating. Today you’re lucky: the apples are ripe and will fall into your basket -- depending on the season, Gravensteins or Boskoops or Pippins or Baldwins or McIntosh. Swing the basket onto your back, step into the generous shade as wasps lift from the fallen fruit and circle your feet. Brace the ladder on a sturdy branch and climb the wooden rungs, the cider smell following you like rising steam. Emerald leaves tickle your face as jealous finches flit past. The coolness of Eve’s perfect apple kisses your palm and a rhythm emerges from medieval memories as you roll each apple upwards, releasing it from the branch with a little twist. A soft breeze cools the back of your neck, a drop of sweat runs down between your shoulder blades. You stretch further out to gather the ripest, then pull back and let the bark hug your hip as you steady yourself, shifting the weight on your back. The only task is to become part of the cycle, to be reborn under the apple canopy. Today you’re lucky: the branches hang heavy and the fruit is flawless. Your help is agile and experienced with ladders, and they cross the orchard smoothly, singing.