My Apple Tree

I'm sitting in my apple tree, a place of peace and respite. It's warm, and I see the blue sky through the leaves as I recline on my favorite branch. I hear the neighbors playing outside, the birds singing, bees buzzing: country sounds. It's a lazy day, as if nothing in particular is going to happen. Cutting through the quiet, a car is coming, but it's too loud and going too fast and there is loud music, and I jump out of my tree. Something tells me to run, I feel an urgency, but don't know why. And then I'm running across the grass and over the ditch and into the neighbor's yard and I hear something like an explosion. I'm running toward the street with the other kids and the car is there at the end of the driveway, where it landed, crumpled in the front and the windshield is cracked. And we all stop and time seems to stop with us. There are two young men in the front seat and they seem to be sleeping, which doesn't make sense; how can you sleep and drive a car? They have long curly hair, and I think how beautiful their hair is, and how peaceful they are. But their heads seem crooked and awkward, and the music is still playing and nothing seems right, but I don't know what it is. I'm 9 and not much in this world makes a lot of sense to me. I see blood on their faces, in their eyes, their beautiful hair, and I don't understand why they don't wake up; can't they hear the music? And we just stand there, taking it all in not knowing what to do. Sirens, I hear sirens and then one of the older neighbor kids guides us away from it all and my mother is running out of the house to see what happened and if the kids are hurt, and she sees. She takes me back to the house and she is silent. None of it is clear; I'm in a fog, but later, when the adults think I am not listening, I hear words. "Dead at the scene, but the other one might live." "Drinking and drugs." "Driving 55 miles per hour." It starts to sink in, though some of the words are unfamiliar. Dead? The young man was dead? He looked asleep; how could he be dead? Death means nothing to my 9 year-old way of thinking. I have a lot of questions but I don't know how to ask them, and no one explains anything to me, and so I climb into my apple tree and ponder. I was a witness to death, a finality incomprehensible to me, for the first time in my life. I was a witness to foolish choices; foolish and reckless actions that could not be undone. I think of my apple tree often, especially when apple trees are blooming, and I can never think of my tree without thinking of those two beautiful, foolish men, and what they could have been and done, who they could have loved or touched, if they had not gotten in the car. I wonder if they both died, or if one lived, and what his life was like afterward. I wonder about their parents and families and how they all coped with the tragedy. I think on all the foolish and reckless choices I made in my younger days, and marvel that I lived. Life is a wonder, a gift, a mystery. Cherish it.