My friend Todd Heifner Youngest rother Brad died in late April . Was very impressive memorial service you can google at New Millenium church in Arkansas. Eric Motley grand friend of Brad since Samford in the mid nineties flew down from his post as associate director of the National Art Museum in DC to deliver a eulogy as did Mart Gray magnificent effort.
Last week Todd posted this memory on facebook
What Now For The Damned Crabapple Tree?
You’d have to know what a nightmare the yard was at our home just a few days after we moved in. It’s a hard thing to realize that the biggest investment of your lifetime now is the embodiment of your favorite movie—maybe ever—“a river runs through it.”
Our backyard caught all the water from the neighborhood it seemed and we wondered would we ever establish a yard?
Well, given the beauty and serenity that is now ours out back, I’m not sure I’d trade it. That’s thanks to lots and lots of intention, sweat, and moving the same plant from place…..to place…..to place. But to be sure, it is now a place of respite and grace given the vision Amanda had for the yard, and that she and our friend Genaro and I have cultivated these past five years at her direction.
I didn’t ask for much when the landscaping was picked. Just a few specific irises and the planting of two crabapple trees—ones I remember specifically from the days of my childhood.
But the crabapple trees weren’t for me. They were planted on our 3/4 acre wetland for the purpose of producing great harvests of crabapples for my brother Brad.
Brad was many things to many folks. For me, at least, a part of who he was generated from a healthy mix of nostalgia, love, and generosity which he heaped in massive amounts on those he loved.
And Brad loved everybody.
When my brothers and I were growing up, one of the rituals of our summers—just days after school was out—was a one-way bus trip from the Nashville, Tennessee Continental Trailways bus station on Sixth and Commerce Streets downtown to the Texarkana, Arkansas Trailways Depot on Stateline Road. You could step out the front door of that Texarkana station, walk to the corner of the block, cross the street and be in Texas.
We did it every summer even though the last admonition in Nashville was “Not for any reason are you to leave any of the bus stations where the bus stops along the route. Not in Jackson, nor Memphis, nor Little Rock, nor Hot Springs, nor Texarkana. Do you understand??”
With a head nod of ascent to the parents, we would board the bus and just wait for the 11 hour bus trip to pass when we knew—just like Sam Bowie, or Davie Crockett, or Sam Houston—we would dismount our ride and saunter into Texas without any constraint of oversight, just us cowboys and our earthly goods.
My brothers and I were blessed to have all four of our grandparents into adulthood, but those summers when we were teenagers and older grade school kids making our annual journey to Plain Dealing, Louisiana on the bus, to spend five or six weeks with our grandparents…….well that was just heaven.
One of the many great memories of those summers was climbing my paternal grandparents HUGE crabapple tree in the middle of the gravel turnaround in their driveway. We would scamper up the tree and collect crabapples for the world’s greatest crabapple wars, fought in the backyard between the sheets and other wash my grandmother had hung out to dry. It was a fit battleground for us young warriors.
But even more what I recall was gathering bushel baskets full of those crabapples, and my grandmother—the one who couldn’t cook!—making the finest homemade crabapple jelly anywhere in those parts.
And we would feast on it for breakfast on toast, or over in the afternoon with peanut butter on slices of goosedown soft Holsum white bread. It was heaven.
Well younger brother Brad not only partook of the fun, the food, and the firepower of a stinging hot crabapple, he also watched and listened, learning how to make that crabapple jelly and refining his own recipe over many, many years.
About the time Amanda and I relocated to Pelham some six years ago, Brad told me in a late night phone marathon how hard it had become to make his annual batch of crabapple jelly. Due, he said, for want of suitable crabapples with which to cook this homemade treat. They were increasingly hard to find, he said.
So I indicated to Amanda my desire to plant such a tree in our yard in order to supply Brad a key ingredient for years to come.
We planted two of these trees initially, but lost one to water and root damage.
The second tree, however, has struggled and survived through these past half dozen years. This spring it was covered in blossoms indicating a fine crop of crabapples was on the way.
I got great joy in thinking of delivering such a copius yield of this hardened fruit to Brad at harvest time this year for him to recreate the recipe of our youth.
But that was not to be, due to Brad’s passing some seven weeks ago on May 2.
And so I was left wondering upon returning home from his memorial service—
“What now for the damned crabapple tree?”
Having convinced myself to remove it from the back yard due to the rankish smell it makes when unpicked crabapples fall to the ground in late fall, I looked out the family room window Friday afternoon before last, considering how best to fell the tree. I was berating myself for having planted the thing in the first place—“a stupid idea,” I thought, “and more nostalgia than sensible.”
And that’s when I saw it.
The tree was moving, teeming with life almost as if a mini-earthquake was disturbing this tree alone.
And then the darts that started to fly from within the tree—hummingbirds, dozens of them, like a swarm of bees around a hive.
There were so many of them the tree literally looked as if it were shaking—burning, if you will, with a voice from the Great Beyond.
And so for now, it seems, this has become the tree where the hummingbirds rest. A tree that was dead in my eyes, particularly given the grief at having lost my brother this spring, and all the memories and promise the tree held. Yet it is now more alive than ever! Teeming with copius amounts of nostalgia, love, and generosity.
And teeming with life……in the shadow of death.
Who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at making crabapple jelly this fall. Or maybe not.
I’m thankful for the hummingbirds.
And for this crabapple tree.
