Eve's apple tree

It looked so nice, as it stood there. The trunk was straight and the crown rich and green but it was all the beautiful apples as caught the attention, for a healthy apple tree with many apples were pleasing to look at.

It was the first time the tree carried so many fruits. It was only a few years old, and every year it was followed with excitement. “Will there be real apples this year?” The tree had worn a few apples before, but first now it was as it should be. “By the book,” said the beech tree that stood on the other side of the white-painted picket fence.

The apple tree even felt good, almost the same feeling as an eighteen year of age have with a newly acquired driver’s license in hand, and it felt like a serious joy that crawled right out into the finest ramifications.

“Now I’m an adult,” cheered it, “and when the summer has gone to a close, I will help to keep the big circuit go on. My descendants will see the world and start a family anywhere there are growth in the air and good soil to gain a foothold in. The kernels gets wings, if some children will eat of my apples, because they throw the cores around, and it’s better than housewives throwing together for kitchen garbage. Kernels should be spread, and birds have seldom access to kitchen garbage, and then will my kernels not get wings.”

The beech looked kindly indulgent down on the apple tree and added: “Not to discourage you, but isn’t there a limit to how far birds fly before they can deliver the kernels again? I mean, “The whole world” is big words. You will certainly be lucky if they reach the border, or at most to northern Italy.”

“Yes, you may be right,” replied the apple tree. “But in the long run it probably will work for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, etc. gets longer and longer range, and therefore there is no reason to put the light under a bushel, or to crop the dreams. I am boundless when I feel all the zest for life and power of growth as is pouring out of me, and with so lovely, beautiful children, I am the richest tree, and although some of the apples will fall close to my trunk, there will hopefully be some spreading genes for all four winds to the four corners of the world. “

Eve sat on a white painted garden bench with a cup of coffee that smelled wonderful in the heat of the sun. The lawn had the healthiest green color and formed a golden age quaint contrast to the bench. The flowers in the garden was a delight to the eye, the dog roses scent mingled with the summer heat, and along with the many other scents, not forgetting the coffee, it triggered a sense of reality as reality really was or should be.

She rejoiced in her apple tree and its many fruits. She remembered clearly when she had bought the tree from the nursery, and had both before or since felt that a garden without apple trees wasn’t a real garden. But it was probably because she herself had grown up with fruitful gardens, where, in addition to apple and pear trees also were plums and mirabelles, redcurrants and blackcurrants, raspberries, cherries, and very down to earth both potatoes, radishes, carrots, strawberries and various herbs.

This tradition would she maintain, and the coffee tasted heavenly.

Love patterns

“I wish she would soon come,” said the elf while he impatiently tore grass up from the forest floor. They had agreed to meet near the smallest lake in the largest forest while the sun was highest in the sky, and he had arrived at least an hour too early.

For him she was Alpha and Omega. He smiled dreamily at the thought of her long, curved eyelashes which blinked so exquisitely seductive that it almost seemed deliberate. It didn’t matter she was acting coy in this way, rather the contrary.

She was adorable and so endearing that he found it difficult to sit still when they were together. He watched her incessantly, alternating from all possible sides, and his mind was completely focused on her. He had to roam her “by chance” and feel her delicate scent again, again and again. There was no end to it.

They used to dance cheering up and down and back and forth on sunbeams. Today there was not a breath of wind, the sky was almost blue, as there were many spots where the last clouds were evaporating. It would be a waste of time not to enjoy such a beautiful day when the sun’s rays were reflected in the leaves, and shimmering and glittering in their shiny wings, so one could almost come to think of lit sparklers.

A young couple who took a walk in the woods, for the air’s, the digestive and the dog’s fault, as they put it, caught sight of them, and the girl exclaimed:

“Nah, look at these beautiful dragonflies. How they sparkles. It looks like they weave love patterns in the air.

Apple slices

In the Garden of Eden, Adam was “Eve-luated” and found to be suitable.

After enjoying Eve’s fruit he for the first time felt like a real man and not as a discarded apple core, and after watching very carefully, he decided to recognize Eva as the real one.

When they later were sent out in the cold, Adam had to get them clothes. He hunted suitable fur as he peeled so that they after some laborious processing could dress in it.

Until then, they were only dressed in bare skin, except for a few fig leaves.

Then they had to bite the bullet (bite the sour apple) and get a relationship – to the world too. They felt there were a world of difference. Since then there were both ups and downs.

Eva uses now her new Apple a lot. She writes with another good singer in the Big Apple, which plans to release a record in the Beatles’ old record label.

But right now she enjoys some apple slices with Adam.

It's about time

The wristwatch, the alarm clock and the sundial were discussing which of them understood time best. They lay under an apple tree where they were taking a break from a lecture on pocket-philosophy.

“Before dawn of time, there was no time,” said the wristwatch. “It’s merely a phrase, an analogy, never being quite accurate and therefore impossible to relate real and scientific to. Basically indisputable as well,” he added smiling.

“Before no time existed, there was time,” said the alarm clock. “And before that no time existed, apart from the periods with time.”

“Well,” continued the sundial, “when a period of time is ripe, as an apple falling to the ground, the future lies latent within its seeds. To the seeds the idea of time makes no sense before the right conditions are obtained, enabling them to grow roots and sprout. They awake little by little, and after some time they turn into apple trees having their own time and their own apples. In that time of course time exists.”

“I believe,” said the wristwatch, “that while no time existed, the new times were there latent with a causal past influencing the fruits of the future, as time gets ripe. In a figurative manner of speaking you could call them, the fruits of Karma.”

“And in this way everything continues,” the alarm clock added, “without a beginning or an end. I think some of the apples may have philosophized and coming to the conclusion that they originated from seeds, but then they got stuck. They theorized a lot, for instance about various construction types of cores, coming from strange areas with no time.”

“They are way too imaginative,” thought the apple tree, “although it’s still not forbidden fruit to wonder, think or guess.”

Solstrejf.

De fleste ville sikkert sige om Mike, at han var ret god. Hvor han var hyret til at underholde, blev omgivelserne gerne lidt opstemte. For Mike spillede og sang noget folk kendte til, og holdt af. Og han fik mange henvendelser fra både private og foreninger, men hvad kun få opdagede var, at under hans kække kasket og bag hans venlige smil var en alfemester med magiske kræfter. Dem havde han opnået ved daglig indtagelse af bær fra en busk, som voksede et hemmeligt sted i Hammer Bakker, i nærheden af Vodskov. Der fandtes, i hele riget, kun denne ene busk, men til gengæld bar den bær hele året.

Alfekongen havde egenhændigt plantet den, og kun nogle få, udvalgte alfer vidste besked om den.

Folk, som hørte ham spille og synge, tænkte ikke nærmere over at de, efter at have passeret ham, havde store smil på læberne, for umiddelbart skilte han sig ikke ud som sådan, men folk lagde ubevidst deres travle færden omkring ham igen og igen, som om de havde glemt noget i handelens travlhed. Samtidig sugede de af hans kunstneriske nektar, som han leverede i det skjulte, for selv om han ofte smilede imødekommende, gjorde han ingen stads af sig selv i virkeligheden.

Udenfor indkøbscenteret, hvor han netop havde underholdt, stod to grupper og studerede buskøreplanen. Så sagde en dame, med fire, fyldte indkøbsposer, pludselig:

”Det er et dejligt centertorv. God ide med det åbne glasloft de har lavet der, så man kan se solen skinne, mens man går og ser på tilbud.”

”Så vidt jeg husker, er der da ikke åbent glasloft der, men det føltes godt nok sådan i dag. Der er måske lavet et eller andet med noget indirekte lys?”

”Jamen, da vi passerede, ham der stod og spillede, kom jeg til at tænke på, at vi hellere måtte købe noget solcreme, nu vi var her, for der var jo sommerstemning, og jeg følte mig så let om hjertet.”

”Joh, men selv om der er varmt i dag, er der ikke meget sol at se. Hele dagen har det nærmest set ud som om det kan begynde at regne når som helst.”

”Ja, det er jo rigtigt. Bare det nu holder tørt, til bussen kommer.”

The organic tenor

He breathed as deep as he could, pinching the buttocks together, looked back a couple of times, stopped breathing, bowed and took courage to say:

“Want to dance?”

Her gaze hit his neck and slid slowly downwards, for a moment considered his shoes and then slipping into the impersonal background:

“I’m already engaged.”

“Now again,” he thought desperately. “Why do they all say no? I might as well go home and go to bed. My days start early, and when the cows are herded into the meadow and I’m plowing, I feel good. When I sit at the tractor with my pipe in the mouth, followed by flying and diving gulls, and watching the furrows, I don’t feel the taste of these bitter drops, but am looking forward to the cap loose on the thermos and pour a drop of coffee up. That’s my life, and perhaps the highest goal that preliminary is set for me.

He had even been washed in the face, and had lubricated the forearms carefully with his deodorant. To cap it all, he came a lot brilliantine in his hair and slapped abundant the shaved cheeks with Esprit de Valdemar, so there shouldn’t be something to mention there, and the smell of cow and pig barn, which had to hang on, should now be eliminated. He could at least himself just smell the overwhelming shades that came from the materials he had bought in the supermarket, to look good in festive occasions. He also had smeared petroleum jelly on his sun-shelled ears, to smooth the similarity with the bark of old trees which was unavoidably after many weeks in the field, where the sun was often relentless.

But the girls wouldn’t dance with him. Maybe because they knew he only was general farm man, and not foreman like Kevin, but as he after a few years from now would become herdsman on Northern Fields Farm, which had four chimneys, they would with no doubt notice him. So he could probably also begin to be critical and merely ask the good looking girls to dance.

One thing that no one but the cows and gulls knew, or at least believed, was that he could sing The Yellow Rose Of Texas as good as Bobby Horton, maybe like José Carreras would have sung it, but it was not so simple to achieve general attention to that. If the girls had heard him sing, there might have been some that would ignore his unmistakable scent of farm life, which was mixed with the smell of brilliantine and Esprit De Valdemar, accompanied by a subtle after smell from petroleum jelly.

But the gulls and the cows heard him, and when he put his pipe in the pocket and singing his heart’s content, the cows began to gather and walk towards him. They knew that it was about time going home and being milked, and together they went, with wonderfully relaxed and meaningful glances toward the Milky Way with nodding heads, like the undulating surface of a lazy river that flowed towards the lower-lying areas.

Rits Ruts fillijong

Elf-Times’ journalists nearly all were on summer vacation. Right now is a great time for vacation as local news are not standing in line, just because so many are on vacation, and then it bites its own tail. Most have traveled to warm countries, so there is ‘where it snows.’ But Elf-Times sticks to the local stuff.

Locally, there have been thunderstorms and torrential rain. The three forest lakes had gone over their banks and forest paths were changed into babbling brooks. People in the village had one and all lost their pot lids and ladles and keenly discussed why and how this had happened.

The elves had been on necessary thief-expeditions in the dead of night.

They used the newly acquired reversed pot lids as boats, and used the ladles as paddles. Then they could go back and forth, so the logistics would work. The babbling brooks were, for them, raging rivers and not to be trifled with.

Elfred and Cupid had assembled a pot full of eggs from some mallard nests by forest lakes’ shores. They only took a couple from each nest, for they knew that it would not bother the ducks at the least, and now they had enough for a nice big omelet.

Kirsten Matchmaker who lived in a fern-shelter two squirrel jumps from Elfred and one from Cupid, was eminently to make omelets, and Elfred and Cupid hardly had transferred the eggs to her before she started to knock them out.

“You can soon put teeth into the omelet,” she sang as she swung water lily-bowls, pots and pans, “and then I’ll play up to a dance.”

Elfred and Cupid thought it was alright, Kirsten had already put her little accordion up, and they thought she played quite well. She could at least get one’s feet move, so they would invite the two lovely nymphs who lived in the abandoned woodpecker-whole which never stood under water.

“Anything new in Elf-Times today?” said Amor.

“Don’t know” answered Kirsten. “The journalists have traveled south, and all that south stuff is nothing to write home about for a local newspaper, but after a three weeks when holidays are over, polishes I my glasses again. Well, now we’ll see if we can remember the lyrics to our dance. When I play and sing while you dance the sun comes again, if I remember the right words. It’ll evaporate much of all the water we’ve got and we can provide pot lids and ladles back to the kitchens where they guaranteed are missed.”

The omelet was on the pan, and while Kirsten concentrated on this, she hummed a trial of the song they were supposed dancing to after the omelet. Gradually the words appeared, and now she sang in an undertone, perhaps to be sure also to sing quite right, while she played. She claimed namely, she could multitask, and multitasking was an incarnate woman virtue, her great grandmother had taught her.

Elfred and Cupid were looking forward to the omelet and to dance with the nymphs afterwards, and they both smiled expectantly while Kirsten cooked and rehearsed:

“Rits Ruts fillijong, gong, gong, will you be my elf, then come, come, come!
Rits Ruts fillijong, gong, gong, will you be my sun, then come!
And all the nymphs lift up their skirt so high that you could spot a glimpse of raunchy underwear.
Tralalala, Tralalala, Tralalala, Tralalala, Tralalala, Tralalala, Tralalala, trala.”