Green Appples

"Don't eat the apples," my grandmother Ruby told me firmly, "Green apples will make you sick."

High in the branches of the apple tree, her warning seemed more like a challenge. I could see her on the veranda,
a shawl around her shoulders, a basket of corn beside her rocking chair and several ears in her lap. Her spectacles glinted in the late afternoon sun as she glanced my way every now and then but she said nothing more. I could hear Uncle Byron's chain saw in the distance, my daddy playing the old pump organ from the parlor, voices drifting down from the barn where my brothers were playing in the hayloft. An old mama cat was asleep atop the well, her kittens tumbling around her and playing kitten games. Ruby rocked on. And I ate the apples.

Later, as she humorlessly forced some god-awful home remedy down my throat, I vowed to listen to her in the future.She held me silently through the chills and vomiting, put hot towels against my belly and cold ones on my face and made me rinse my mouth with water mixed with mint leaves. She was no-nonsense practical, grimly methodical, and not in the least sympathetic. She had doctored many a child who had hadn't listened to her downhome advice and would waste no pity on the self inflicted.

Though the lesson of the green apples is still with me, listening may never be what I do best. I think perhaps that Ruby knew that and wanted me to learn on my own. We learn the most by our mistakes she told me the following morning as she made me dry toast and ( of all things ) apple juice. It was a gentle version of "I told you so." and it was said with love and just the slightest suggestion of a smile.