# When I Was a Little Girl/Chapter 6

VI
MY LADY OF THE APPLE TREE
Our lawn was nine apple trees large. There were none in front, where only Evergreens grew, and two silver Lombardy poplars, heaven-tall. The apple trees began with the Cooking-apple tree by the side porch. This was, of course, no true tree except in apple-blossom time, and at other times hardly counted. The length of twenty jumping ropes—they call them skipping ropes now, but we never called them so—laid one after another along the path would have brought one to the second tree, the Eating- apple tree, whose fruit was red without and pink- white within. To this day I do not know what kind of apples those were, whether Duchess, Gilliflower, Russet, Sweet, or Snow. But after all, these only name the body of the apple, as Jasper or Edith names the body of you. The soul of you, like the real sense of Apple, lives nameless all its days. Sometime we must play ​the game of giving us a secret name—the Pathfinder, the Lamplighter, the Starseeker, and so on. But colours and flavours are harder to name and must wait longer than we.
. . . Under this Nameless tree, then, the swing hung, and to sit in the swing and have one’s head touch apple-blossoms, and mind, not touch them with one’s foot, was precisely like having one’s swing knotted to the sky, so that one might rise in rhythm, head and toe, up among the living stars. I can think of no difference worth the mentioning, so high it seemed. And if one does not know what rhythm is, one has only to say it over: Spring, Summer, apple- blossom, apple; new moon, old moon, running river, echo and then one will know.
“I would pick some,” said Mother, looking up at the apple-blossoms, “if I only knew which ones will never be apples.”
So some of the blossoms would never be apples! Which ones? And why?
“Why will some be apples and some others never be apples?” I inquired.
But Mother was singing and swinging me, and she did not tell.
“Why will you be apples and you not be ​apples, and me not know which, and you not know which?” I said to the apple-blossoms when next my head touched them. Of course, you never really speak to things with your throat voice, but you think it at them with your head voice. Perhaps that is the way they answer, and that is why one does not always hear what they say. . . .
The apple-blossoms did not say anything that I could hear. The stillness of things never ceased to surprise me. It would have been far less wonderful to me if the apple-blossoms and the Lombardy poplars and my new shoes had answered me sometimes than that they always kept their unfriendly silence. One’s new shoes look so friendly, with their winking button eyes and their placid noses! And yet they act as cross about answering as do some little boys who move into the neighbourhood.
. . . Indeed, if one comes to think of it, one’s shoes are rather like the sturdy little boys among one’s clothes. One’s slippers are more like little girls, all straps and bows and tiptoes. Then one’s aprons must be the babies, long and white and dainty. And one’s frocks and suits—that is to say, one’s new frocks and ​suits—are the ladies and gentlemen, important and elegant; and one’s everyday things are the men and women, neither important nor elegant, but best of all; and one’s oldest garments are the witches, shapeless and sad and haunted. This leaves ribbons and sashes and beads to be fairies—both good and bad.
The silence of the Nameless tree was to lift a little that very day. When Mother had gone in the house,—something seemed always to be pulling at Mother to be back in the house as, in the house, something always pulled at me to be back out-of-doors,—I remember that I was twisting the rope and then lying back over the board, head down, for the untwisting. And while my head was whirling and my feet were guiding, I looked up at the tree and saw it as I had never seen it before: soft falling skirts of white with lacy edges and flowery patterns, drooping and billowing all about a pedestal, which was the tree trunk, and up-tapering at the top like a waist—why, the tree was a lady! Leaning in the air there above the branches, surely I could see her beautiful shoulders and her white arms, her calm face and her bright hair against the blue. She had ​risen out of the trunk at the tree’s blossoming and was waiting for someone to greet her.
I struggled out of the swing and scrambled, breathless, back from the tree and looked where she should be. Already I knew her. Nearly, I knew the things that she would say to me—sometimes now I know the things that she would have said if we had not been interrupted.
The interruption came from four girls who lived, as I thought, outside my world,—for those were the little days when I did not yet know that this cannot be. They were the Eversley sisters, in full-skirted, figured calico, and they all had large, chapped hands and wide teeth and stout shoes. For a year they had been wont to pass our house on the way to the public school, but they had spoken to me no more than if I had been invisible—until the day when I had first entered school. After that, it was as if I had been born into their air, or thrown in the same cage, or had somehow become one of them. And I was in terror of them.
“Come ’ere once!” they commanded, their voices falling like sharp pebbles about the Apple-blossom lady and me.
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Across the street Delia was sitting on the gatepost, ostentatiously eating chocolate layer cake, and with her free hand twisting into a curl the end of her short braid. Between us there seemed to have revealed itself a gulf, life-wide. Had Delia always known about me? Did the Rodman girls know? And Calista? The four Eversleys must know—this was why they laughed so. . . . But I remember how, most of all, I hoped that Mary Elizabeth did not know—yet.
From that day I faced the truth: I was different. I was somehow not really-truly. And it seemed to me that nothing could ever be done about it.