Jack was born and raised Up North, married a girl from Deep South Mississippi, and that is where they settled and raised kids.
Jack missed a few things about Up North (New York State I think.) He had been raised near apple orchards and spent his youth working for various farmers, picking apples and helping care for the trees. He longed to grow apple trees himself in deep south Mississippi.
Now up in the "icebox" part of the state near the Tennessee line, he might have had some luck. But in the long hot humid summers in south Mississippi he couldn't get themn to thrive.
Jack ordered little trees from seed catalogs and a few times went home Up North and always babied little specimens to bring back and plant. He grafted, pruned, fertilized, watered, kept the grass cut around the plants, sprayed and worried from the time the blooms appeared in springtime. Every day while fruit should have been forming, he monitored his trees. Soon, the blooms would fall off and no fruit appeared.

A few years the gnarly trees would produce some small mis-shapen apples that all kinds of critters, especially deer just loved.
When I saw Jack, he was my home health patient, an elderly man with heart trouble. He showed me a small bowl of this hard earned fruit he had picked green to save them from predators. I ate an apple he offered right there in front of him and praised the taste of it. Jack beamed. He was so proud.

As Jack aged and his health failed, he asked his son one autumn to take him on his tractor to ckeck out the back side of his property he hadn't visited for years. The cornfield and pasture had grown up with trees and weeds. His son took him as close to the back fence as possible. There to Jack's amazement, was a beautiful apple tree, swallowed up, hidden by sedge grass as tall as its lower branches, pine and oaks hiding it in partial shade. The tree was loaded with apples as lovely as he had ever seen.
Neglected, ignored, with no human intervention, this tree had done what Jack had failed to do--produce perfect apples. His son wanted to mow around the tree and care for it, but Jack decided to leave it alone. He preferred to visit it instead, and did so till the end of his life.

susil