Each year it happens. The apple tree viewed from my balcony gives up its fruit until at last one solitary apple remains high up, beyond reach, riper, redder, more robust than any of the others that have fallen or been gathered.
Unmoved by rain, unshaken by winds. It is as if this one remaining fruit is determined to resist the onset of winter.
Day after day I awaken; raise my bedroom blind, rub my eyes and seek it out amidst the protecting foliage.
At first resistant to my gaze, it then proudly displays its presence, as if to say “Behold, I still remain, a testament to the perseverance of Fall.”
Each year I too remain despite the apple’s everlasting reminder that I myself am transient and will one day be shaken from my bough.
I am reminded of O. Henry’s last leaf painted by an aged artist to give support and strength and sustenance to fading hope of life’s recovery. Perhaps the apple, too, is but a dab of oil on canvas.
Indeed, am I myself a product of an artist’s keen, unfailing eye; living in some vast parallel universe adjacent to and yet unseen by all those bygone friends, amidst an orchard of fallen, rotting apples?