In a tiny village near the coast in England, there once lived a little girl called Maria, who lived with her father in a small house. The father did not have very much money, so the two of them lived poor, but happy.
At the bottom of their garden stood an old, old apple tree. It had stood there for as long as they could remember, and when they had moved in the previous owners said that it had been there as long as they could remember too, and that the owners before them had said just the same. It looked like an ordinary apple tree, not very large, just fifteen feet high at the very top.
Yet mystery and darkness surrounded this tree and the village folk believed that it was not ordinary at all. Maria remembered well the first time her father had told her the legend of the apple tree when she was very young.
“Now, dear child, it is important that I tell you something about our garden. You see all of the trees in our garden out there. We can look after them, tend them and pick apples from them, but the tree at the bottom of the garden that stands alone, you must not touch.”
“Why, Daddy?” Maria replied quizzically.
“Because legend has it that anyone who picks an apple from that tree then has to live with a great shame and misfortune. Any more than that, I cannot tell you for I do not know. All I know is that neither you, nor myself, nor anybody else can touch it.”
Maria had often thought of these words spoken to her by her father a long time ago and it had never entered into her head to disobey him.
But one day, all of that would change. It was a beautiful summer's day when she walked out of the house and down to the bottom of the garden. Maria loved to look at the tree, even though she knew she was not to touch it. It looked ordinary, yet rugged and wise. ‘This tree,’ she thought, ‘looks as if it has been here since time began.’
She looked at it and pondered quietly in her heart. ‘Why is such a pretty tree standing there untouched by anybody? It has stood here untouched by anyone for all of these years, still standing there with its rosy red apples.’ The dew on the apples winked at her, glistening in the summer sun.
She looked back at the house and could see that her father was sleeping in his armchair with a newspaper on his lap, for he often liked to take forty winks in the afternoon, while she would tend to the garden and pick fruit from the other trees in the orchard.
‘I wonder’, she thought, ‘I wonder why you have been left alone, old tree, for all of this time. Your apples look so good. Here we are poor and needy. We only sell so many apples from the other trees a year and we are still so poor, yet my father leaves these apples in the tree when they look even nicer than the rest.’
She walked up closer to the mysterious, yet kindly looking tree. She gazed upon it and reached up to the nearest branch. At that moment she did something she thought she would never, ever do. Maria broke one of the apples from the tree and took a big bite of just one, rosy red apple. It was the most delicious apple she had ever tasted.
But very soon after she had eaten the apple, Maria suddenly became very anxious and began to tremble with fear. She sweated and fretted and could not understand a feeling that she had never experienced before. Maria had never experienced such a terrible feeling of loss and pain, heartbreak and shame.
She looked up at the tree and thought, ‘My father was right about you!’ She ran back to the house, slamming the door behind her, waking up her father whose newspaper leapt into the air with a jolt of his legs. She ran quickly up to her room, shutting the door behind her and lay face down on her bed. She began to cry, though she knew not why. ‘I don’t ever want to feel this way again!’ she thought, wiping tears from her eyes. ‘I have picked the apple from that tree and it has brought with me the shame and misfortune of the legend! It is a weight too heavy to bear and I cannot tell my father for he warned me not to touch it!’ With a sigh and a wimper she fell asleep on the bed and slept through the rest of the afternoon, the evening, and the night, until morning finally arrived.
