LYING UNDER THE APPLE TREE.(1944 Sunday afternoons)

Over on the other side of town lived a woman named Miriam McAlpin, who kept horses. They were not horses that belonged to her--she boarded them and exercised them for their owners, who were harness-racing people. She lived in the original farmhouse on her land, close to the horse barns, with her old parents, who seldom came outside. Beyond the house and the barns was an oval track, on which Miriam or her stableboy or the owners themselves could sometimes be seen on the low seat of a flimsy-looking sulky, flying along and beating up the dust. (To disguise some people and events, I have allowed myself a certain amount of invention with names and details.)

In one of the pasture fields for the horses, next to the road, there were three apple trees, the remains of an old orchard. Two of them were small and bent, and one was quite large, like a nearly grown maple. They were never pruned or sprayed and the apples were scabby, not worth stealing, but most years there was an abundant flowering, apple blossoms hanging everywhere, in clusters that looked from a distance like trimmings of snow.

I had inherited a bicycle, or at least I had the use of one that had been left behind by our part-time hired man, when he went to work in an aircraft factory for the war effort. It was a man's bike, of course, high-seated and lightweight, of some odd-looking make, long discontinued.

"You're not going to ride that to school, are you?" my sister said, when I started practice rides up and down our lane. My sister was younger than I was, but she sometimes suffered anxiety on my behalf, understanding perhaps before I did the various ways in which I could risk making a fool of myself. She was thinking not just of the look of the bike but of the fact that I was thirteen and in my first year at high school, and that this was a watershed year as far as girls riding bikes to school was concerned. All girls who wanted to establish their femininity had to quit riding them. Girls who continued to ride either lived too far out in the country to walk or were simply eccentric and unable to take account of certain unstated but important rules. We lived just beyond the town limits, so if I had shown up riding a bicycle--and particularly this bicycle--it would have put me in the category of those who wore oxford shoes and lisle stockings.

"Not to school," I said. But I did start making use of the bike, riding it out to the country, along the back roads, on Sunday afternoons. There was little chance then of my meeting anybody I knew, and sometimes I met nobody at all.

I liked to do this because I was secretly devoted to nature. The feeling came from books--first, from the girls' stories by L. M. Montgomery, whose narratives often had some sentences describing a snowy field in moonlight or a pine forest or a still pond mirroring the evening sky. Then it merged with another private passion I had, for lines of poetry. I went rampaging through my school texts to uncover them, before they could be read and despised in class. To show either of these pleasures, the one I took in nature or in poetry, at home or at school, would have put me into a condition of permanent vulnerability, as if I had inadvertently displayed a corner of my underwear. But my rides on Sunday afternoons, that spring, took me into a territory that seemed to be just waiting for the kind of homage I ached to offer. Here were the sheets of water from the flooded creeks, flashing over the land, and the banks of trillium under red-budded trees. Cowcatchers, and pin cherries in the fencerows, breaking into bloom before there was a leaf on them.

The cherry blossoms got me thinking about the big tree in Miriam McAlpin's field. I wanted to look at it when it flowered. And not just to look at it--as you could do from the street--but to get underneath those branches, to lie down on my back with my head against the trunk and to see how it rose, almost as if out of my own skull, rose up and lost itself in an upside-down sea of blossom. Also to see if there were bits of sky showing through, so that I could screw up my eyes and make them foreground not background, bright fragments on that enhanced blue sea. There was a formality about this idea that I craved. It was almost like kneeling down in church--which in our church we didn't do. I had done it only once, when I was friends with Delia Cavanaugh, and her mother took us to the Catholic church on a Saturday to arrange flowers. I crossed myself and knelt in a pew and Delia said--not even whispering--"What are you doing that for? You're not supposed to do that. Just us."