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The Miracle                                              Joachim Frank

(appeared in Door Is A Jar)

 

We had just bought the house on Blue Valley Road. On the grounds in the back of the house there was a giant apple tree that spread its wide branches over the hollow close to the edge of the forest. It had plenty of miniscule worm-ridden fruit, leaves marked with black spots, and bark covered with lichen. In the first year we didn’t touch anything in the whole backyard since we considered everything just part of nature, sacrosanct. The tree was part of the harmonious scene we had bought that would last forever. Flowers came up in unexpected places. A love seat under a canopy of vines swung lightly in the wind. A sea of forsythia near the fence to the neighbor stood in bloom for several weeks.

In the second year we hired a contractor to cut the apple tree back, with the hope to restore it to serious apple production. The man assured us about this as a strong possibility and went to work. Nothing came of it, except that the worm-ridden apples became a bit smaller. The love seat collapsed because the planks of the seat were rotting near the edges and the hook supporting it had rusted through. The forsythia did not sprout a single flower and remained a bastion of green all spring.

In the third year we hired another contractor to take the tree down altogether and make chips out of it, which I could use to cover the weed in our flowerbeds. He did take the tree down but, in our absence, misunderstood the instructions and heaped the chips into our parking space, next to the house. I repaired the love seat, but the forsythias refused to bloom again.

We had visitors the weekend after the tree was felled: my nephew Fred, his wife Miriam and their little daughter Annabel driving over all the way from the Boston area. After they arrived, I recruited Fred to help me cart the wood chips back down to the spot where I needed them, with a wheelbarrow. Meanwhile Miriam with Annabel on her arm did the rounds of our property. When they came back Miriam asked, “So what is this business about the quartz crystal?” It sounded as if she was accusing me of trying to hide something of great significance from our visitors.

“What quartz? What crystal?”

I went with her to the tree trunk in the backyard and, right there, I found a snow-white, fist-sized crystal sticking out from the middle of the freshly-sawn surface. It made no sense.

First, how did it get there, into the middle of the tree?

Second, how did the man and his crew manage to saw off the tree? They must have approached it with the saw from several directions, each time running into fierce ear-splitting resistance, until the cut was complete around the mineral intrusion.

On close inspection I found one clue to the answer of question number one: there were faint marks of boundaries on the surface, suggesting this tree was actually three trees grown together, enclosing this piece of mineral as they grew. It was still not clear how it got there in the first place. A child might have placed it between three slender saplings? And who in his right mind would plant three apple trees within inches of one another?

I promised myself to honor the unprecedented constellation. How often in your lifetime do you see a crystal sprout from the middle of a tree? I decided to polish the surface of the stump, stain it, and coat it with a fine resin. It will look like a postmodern sculpture; like a piece of living room furniture smack in the meadow of a country estate.

But then after a few days had gone by, the crystal got me thinking of charging admission. Public interest could be substantial. Woodstock, where many of the crystal lovers used to live, is not far away. A fair number will still be alive. Parking will be a problem, but isn’t it always the case?

Being a true miracle, the crystal might even attract religious believers of all sorts. I can think of this going viral and global, of becoming another destination of pilgrimage. I could think of printing brochures, of selling trinkets, bibles, Korans, plastic replicas of the tree trunk, complete with the quartz sticking out. Maps of the Berkshires, with our town marked by a little icon. Memory sticks with a virtual reality environment that lets you touch the crystal with your hand, and go right through it.