Apple Blossom Legacy

Lyrics

[Intro]
The wind still carries it, some days in May.
A ghost of sweetness.
Apple blossom snow.

[Verse 1]
Before the fruit, there was the promise.
Pink-white petals on the hill behind the house.
We watched the bees work.
We checked the grafts tied with kitchen twine.
My mother, and her mother before.
Their hands knew the bark of each Baldwin, each stubborn Roxbury Russet.
They said the orchard was a prayer said in spring.

[Chorus]
The men hauled the barrels to market.
Their names are in the ledgers, next to the price of cider.
But the legacy was written by our hands.
In the ache of the shoulder from the picking pole.
In the sticky sweet on the paring knife.
The unseen harvest.
The one that fed the house.

[Verse 2]
August heat, the air thick with wasps.
The ladders leaned just so.
My apron, heavy with windfalls for the sauce.
Bushel baskets scraping the dirt, piled high, higher still.
The scent of ripe fruit, and the scent of sweat.
The sun beating down on our bonnets.
We didn't stop until the wagons were full.

[Chorus]
The men hauled the barrels to market.
Their names are in the ledgers, next to the price of cider.
But the legacy was written by our hands.
In the ache of the shoulder from the picking pole.
In the sticky sweet on the paring knife.
The unseen harvest.
The one that fed the house.

[Bridge]
Then down to the cool dark of the cellar.
The crank of the press, groaning.
The endless turning of the apple peeler.
Slicing rings to hang from the rafters.
Boiling down the butter in the great copper pot.
Steam that smelled of cinnamon and winter.
This was the currency that saw us through the frost.
Not coins, but sustenance.
Not fame, but survival.

[Outro]
The orchards are gone now.
A few gnarled trees stand in a field of new houses.
But the wind, some days in May...
it still remembers.
It whispers our names.
The names the ledgers forgot.