Despite living abroad, three-quarters of my belongings stayed at the house I was brought home to as a newborn, and thus, I’ve never moved. I love my townhouse just outside Campbell, with its three beds, three baths, and a wrap-around yard. The yard has changed over the years—the green deck is now red, the juniper tree cut down, and clovers replaced with turf—but one thing has always remained: the apple tree. As a kid, I remember picking hundreds of apples every September and pawning them off to different people before donating the rest. My brother insists that they are inadequate by themselves, but to me, they’re a treat. We bake pies and crumbles that remind me of childhood—like the time I climbed the tree and our cat Flash trailed after me, nearly sending me tumbling.
I love that it’s seasonal. Obviously, we could go to the store and buy apples, but there’s something special about going into the yard and picking one myself.
Fall is known across cultures as the harvest season. For Jews, apples dipped in honey mark our New Year, Rosh HaShanah, while Sukkot—just weeks later—celebrates the harvest itself. Sukkot marks the shift from introspection to joy, a rhythm that mirrors both the season and its traditions.
A bonus that comes with the apple tree is a family of opossums. I’ll always remember my first time seeing one. I was maybe seven or eight years old, and as I walked up the stairs, I saw something gray outside the back door, which I thought was my cat. When I spotted the real cat on the couch, I backed down the stairs and asked my dad what the gray creature was. He shrugged, “Oh, it’s just an opossum.” Then there were the two separate occasions our cat Cuddles brought in a baby opossum. Within recent years, we started putting out snacks and a game camera to see their nightly antics, which has brought lots of entertainment to my family.
Next year, I’ll miss plucking an apple when I don’t know what else to eat. I’ll miss pressing bags of fruit into the hands of anyone who visits. Most of all, I’ll miss watching the nightly opossum footage over breakfast. The apple tree has rooted me in this house, forever marking who I am, was, and who I’ll become.