Stored

My grandmother taught me thrift. Each quarter pound paper packet of tea from the grocer was emptied into the tin tea caddy, then carefully taken apart so that not one curled leaf could remain undetected in any fold. The paper was later used to light a fire in the hearth.
Tea, any crops, are hard come by however wealthy you are if you know what goes into the sowing and harvesting. And what comes in between.

I put up with the pricks to my fingers when I'm picking the junipers' berries.
I don't mind that a wasp stings me if I'm collecting windfall apples; we can share.

Each yard here has an old apple tree - at least one, often more. Down by where the marsh harriers hunt around Kuustonmaa on the flat sea-reclaimed land there's a yard has twenty trees. I counted them. There seems to be as many varieties of apple in that orchard. A small child plays there collecting apples from the ground and piling them. Many are gone from the trees, safely harvested. The wasps are no more, with days shorter and nights colder. Maybe it was the great grand-mother and -father of this wee girl who planted the orchard, tree by tree, waiting patiently for the first crop after seven years of tending - keeping frosts and deer at bay, the dog chasing rabbits from the tenderness of the young growing stems.

The land farmed here for a thousand years; apples a recent enough introduction, with a crop going into preserves, jams, pies. Some dried. Sweetness before sugar became commonplace. Fructose - a summer's days stored in each sweet apple. The surplus, when enough had been laid in the cold loft to see a family through winter, sold at market. Essential cash income to small farmers.

Such patience and such rewards. I think of my own tiny orchard at Carbeth, just fruiting its first large crop while I'm away, after those twenty-eight seasons of waiting, spring following winter for seven years. Seven apple-lean years. They're standards mostly and will grow to about fifteen feet high with as big a spread, just as those planted here; grafts onto good rootstock.

There's only nine apple trees at Carbeth and that's planting to the utmost of the available space. All the trees have a connection with children, mine or friends', who get the first fruit each season. The patterns of land and kinship grow strong.

I have no title-deed to that Carbeth orchard and never will. If we succeed in buying the land from the landowner in whose family it's been for generations, it'll be in community ownership. I can only go to the earth, the earth can't go with me. The way it should be.

The old man down the road has brought all his apples in. He used old cardboard apple boxes from a supermarket and his wheelbarrow to move the boxes to the apple loft in his big old wooden barn. The barn itself an old log construction possibly made from the logs from his own felled pines. His driveway is of pines with all the lower branches taken off. They grow straight and tall, plenty of space, plenty light. It's likely he won't see them fully mature. But he grows them on.

Who knows in fifty years will be eating apples from the trees I planted.

Tammimäki has somewhere between fifty and a hundred mature oak trees. Ten times that number growing up with their roots interlocked and part of the land for a thousand years. The farmers here let them grow in the middle of arable crops. Not sentiment, but there's immovable bedrock upthrusts where the trees are islanded. Nevertheless, each knows the oaks are an inseperable part of this land - no financial value any more, but adding, for just one example, their leaves all and every autumn to the soil's fertility.

From walking around and slowly adding trees to my internal mapping I estimate that there might be a couple of hundred apple trees in the immediate vicinity in farm yards.

In Saffa, summer before last, the valley was set on fire by newcomers: about forty acres burnt clear of shrub and seven hundred trees destroyed. Productive trees, providing that essential income to farmers; planted by grandmothers, grandfathers. Fountains of fire as wee children watched. Soldiers stood by and watched as well, preventing the farmers from quenching the flames, telling them that this is declared State Land, though the farmers have ancient deeds proving the land theirs.
People are injured trying to reach their fields, other newcomers act as observers and are helping to try to plant new orchards, with the harassment of the military: this is declared State Land.

My apple trees grow in the wet west of Scotland. This is Finland, where apples are gathered in the burnish of October sun. Saffa is in hot dry Palestine where trees are easily burned to ash.

Watching the flames of family trees, just as I watched granny emptying tea, what is stored in the memories of the children of Saffa?