
There’s and old, old apple tree at the Comanche Venable trailhead in Colorado. No one tends it now but the browsing deer. It’s grown scraggely and wide as the years pass. In spring its whitepink blooms billow in the montane sun. By September the fruit finally ripens to a sour, wormy greenred, hard and plump, abundant til they freeze and fall in the darkening days of autumn. The tree is a touchstone within my Rocky Mountain life.