The rotten apple

Last week I went to check on the apples I had stored in the shed from the tree at the bottom of the garden. Every year the tree is loaded with splendid cooking apples and at the beginning of October we pick them and store them in large trays for use over the winter. Each week we check the apples and each week there are one or two that are rotten or have started to rot. These we take out of the trays and use the good bits to make pies and crumbles.

One of this week’s apples had completely rotted and all that was left was a brown soggy mess in the paper it had been wrapped in. My daughter suggested it was useless and was set to throw it into the compost bin. She suggested it was a pointless waste for an apple to rot so completely – and that it was a bad bit of evolution for an apple to be so likely to rot that it would be made useless by rotting like this.

I reminded her that if rotting did not happen, the earth would be covered in apples, other fruit and leaves and of course fungi were also part of evolution and had evolved to live on this vegetative material. By rotting the material, fungi were returning nutrients to the soil from where plants could once more use them to grow – thus a cycle was complete. I told her to take the rotting apple in the garden and break it apart carefully to see what was inside. She returned with 8 seeds, or apple pips. These pips, I told her, are the means by which next year new apple trees could grow; thus the tree could reproduce itself. And what’s more the rotting flesh of the apple would enrich the soil where the pips fell – giving the seeds the best start for next year.

I have heard prison referred to by people as a ‘rotting hell-hole’. And maybe this rotting is not so bad after all. Maybe, like the apple, the rotting of the old person, or at least parts of the old person, can enrich the new life that can grow out of the seeds of opportunity that lie inside us all. And like the apple, it is only by the old lifestyle rotting that a new one can grow in the future. But like the apple we need to focus upon the seeds of our life that can grow into whatever – just as the pips can grow into new trees once the old ways or fruit has rotted away.