I wrote about planting apple trees this spring Front Porch Republic:

Stoughton, WI. “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,” Martin Luther is reported to have said, “I would still plant my apple tree.” I had always thought of the quotation as mere bluster, better suited to Hobby Lobby word art or Arbor Day Foundation mailers than a second thought. The thing is though, I spent the first week of the coronavirus quarantine planting not one, but forty-three apple trees while the world fell apart. Luther’s apocryphal line doesn’t feel quite so cliché to me anymore. It feels more like a test I’ve accidentally passed.

Kerstin and I planted trees during the quarantine because we have grown accustomed to planting trees in March . . .

After Apple-Planting