The Apple Tree Magnet

Matt looked up from his place at the kitchen table. Kelly was staggering down the stairs, her yellow flip-flops smacking against the wood, her arms circled around a cardboard box.

“Found another one,” she said. She stepped into the kitchen and set the box down with a thud in front of him. All morning long she had been bringing down boxes from the attic, some the size of a shoe box and some so large she looked like an ant struggling to carry a crumb twice its size back to the ant hill. Early that morning, before the sun had even had a chance to rise, she had announced that it was time for spring cleaning. She had suggested they finally tackle the project Matt had been avoiding for years: going through all of his mother’s things up in the attic.

Matt’s mother had kept everything: empty coffee cans, bits of string rolled into a ball, stubs of pencils and pens with dried up ink, even used wrapping paper carefully folded so it could be recycled again for another present. “Never throw away anything that could be useful,” she had always told him. “That’s what you learn when you grow up during the Depression. You never know when something might just come in handy.”

“Most of this stuff can probably go right into the ‘throw away’ pile,” Kelly said, peering into the box. “If we can’t use it for anything and if we can’t get any money for it, there’s no use having it lie around the house gathering dust and taking up space.” She turned and left the kitchen without waiting for a response.

Matt sighed and delved into the contents of the box. Dish towels, aprons, olive green measuring cups with broken handles, and a bag filled with enough magnets to cover the fridge from top to bottom. Matt emptied the bag out onto the table. His mother had collected magnets from every gift shop she had ever gone to. There was the one from the Grand Canyon. Right next to it was the one from Niagara Falls. And there at the bottom of the pile, half buried beneath the Statue of Liberty was the one shaped like an apple tree.

Matt had gotten this magnet himself back in the fall when he was five years old on an apple-picking excursion with his parents. He couldn’t remember the name of the orchard, but the day had been glorious with a sharp blue sky and warm, dry grass so faded it looked like painting that had been left out in the sun for too long. They had gathered a peck of apples, filling the bag with only the Cortlands and Macs. Those ones were the best, his mother had said.

That day, Matt’s father had let him do all of the picking, hoisting Matt up onto his shoulders to reach the higher branches with the reddest, most sun-drenched apples. And then, just like his father, Matt had shined the apple with the front of his plaid shirt, rubbing it in a circle until gleamed. And then there was the crunch of the very first bite, the juice exploding from the crisp white centers, soaking the clean air with the aroma of cinnamon and sunshine and summer rain.

“That stuff’s all just junk, right?” Kelly said.

Matt looked up. He hadn’t even heard her come back into the kitchen. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. Most of it’s just junk.”

Once Kelly had left to go back up to the attic for another box, Matt put the aprons and dish towels and broken measuring cups into the junk pile. Then he brought the bag of magnets over to the fridge, placing the memories one by one onto the stainless steel, putting the apple tree magnet in the center, right at eye level where he could see it every day.