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All through the summer, the hillside was working its magic on me. I was feeling much better. The gloom had lifted, and nature was offering me its cure. Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had counted on it because it had worked for me before.

Where there is harmony there is likely to be health, and what is nature but the harmonious arrangement of air, water, sunshine and soil? I worked hard in the mornings when the day was cool and slowed in the afternoons in the heat. Sometimes, after lunch, I snoozed on the plywood deck, my hat pulled down over my eyes and my sweatshirt rolled under my head as a pillow, and now and again I took a break from my work and walked into the woods nearby to the place where I thought I might plant the orchard. I paced off about an acre, roughly in a square, and surveyed the sun and slope, which seemed to me just right for apple trees. Apple trees like a little slope to shed the cold air that threatens the late frosts of spring; valleys and depressions collect the cold air and are hostile to spring’s tender blossoms.

I’m not sure where I picked it up, but I had been carrying around the idea of an orchard of my own for a long time. Everything about an orchard appealed to me: planting and caring for the trees, watching their growth, the ripening toward red and yellow, slipping the slender picking ladder into the branches so I could reach the fruit, the abundance of the harvest and the pies and preserves that would follow.

My favorite food is apple pie and ice cream. I could live on it, I am convinced, and I always feel better after I’ve eaten a piece. Way back, the apple pie and diner passage in Kerouac’s On the Road had given me an immediate flash of self-recognition, and later I committed to memory many of Robert Frost’s lines about apples. My favorite character in American history is Johnny Appleseed. He is our homegrown John the Baptist, walking west with tattered clothes and a tin pot as a hat, spreading fruit trees and love across the countryside and offering salvation not through water but with a jug of cider. Here was a man who lived the Sermon on the Mount. The old varieties that he had scattered across Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana were in themselves a national lyric read aloud—Spys and Winesaps, Pippins, Rhode Island Greenings, Baldwins, Snows and Coppins, Porters, Priestleys and Russets. The names of apples evoke for me our better natures as Americans, and an agrarian past and the sounds of fiddles and dulcimers. Isn’t this the country we still wanted it to be? I resolved to plant some of the antique apples in my orchard, should I ever get to put one in. John Chapman of Leominster, Massachusetts, had lived through nature, and nature had lived through him. That was nothing if not harmony.

And what was behind the harmony of the apples, of the pink lady’s slippers I found on my farther-ranging walks, or of the yellow mayflies and the trout that sipped them in nearby Great Brook? It seemed to me the result of the inevitable unfolding of laws laid down by the universe and embedded in the elements at hand: air and water, sunshine and earth. It was not by chance that the trees and leaves assumed their unique colors and shapes, or that the small streams flowed into bigger streams, or that the fireflies lit their little lanterns of phosphorescence among the grasses at night. All of this was the consequence of what the universe had commanded. It was chemistry, biology, physics and some inexpressible something else mixed together into one thing, and that thing was inevitability. We respond to the grasses, the trees and the brooks because we sense the deeper truth in them. A brook cannot be false or a tree deceptive, and because we as a species grew up with them, and among them, we are essentially part of them and they of us. By what other means can we be said to be made? What is evolution but the interaction of our potential with the reality of nature? The apples, the leaves, the mayflies, the trout—they express the harmony of nature, as well as the miracle of nature. We are