When we bought our house in Athens, it came with an old crab apple tree in the far corner of the backyard. Shortly after we moved in, the tree came into full and fragrant bloom. It did that for many years thereafter. The pink blossoms were a delight when I looked out the kitchen window.

The kids tried out the gnarled old limbs. It wasn’t a tall tree, but it was tall enough to get a sense of adventure. The cats enjoyed its height as a means of ambush. From the limbs they could hunt rabbits in the other yard or startle the dogs in ours. In the twenty years we lived there, most of those cats ended up buried under that tree after they passed.

On the few occasions of a good snow, the low lying limbs perfectly formed a great fort. A line strung from the apple tree to an old maple in the middle of the yard made for a perfect clothes line, at least until the maple had to be cut down because it provided a perfect underground conduit for termites to come into our house.

There were several years when that crab apple tree produced enough little apples to make jelly. That was mighty fine jelly, too. If, by some chance, the jelly didn’t set up, it made a wonderful pancake syrup.

We prolonged its life several years by having it trimmed. But eventually the tree bore less fruit and had fewer blossoms in the spring. Shortly before we sold the house and moved to Cleveland (2012), tornadoes hit the area. Wind tore a large limb from the old tree. That’s when we found out the tree was serving another purpose. A massive colony of big, black ants was living inside the hollow limbs. No amount of trimming or care could save the old tree this time! It had to come down. That’s when it served its last purpose. I dug a shallow pit where the tree had stood and used some of its wood to cook chicken in the Dutch oven. The chicken and potatoes were delicious, too.

It was a grand old tree and I miss it. As I write this I am reminded of a classic kid’s story, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, where an apple tree loves a boy so much that he gives the boy everything he can, from his apples all the way down to his stump. I think of this old crab apple tree as our Giving Tree.

Susan Kite is the author of five books, with two more in pre-publication. Her books can be found on http://www.amazon.com/author/bookscape . She is a member of the Authors’ Guild of Tennessee. Her website is: www.bookscape.net