The Buckets by Greg Cravens for May 23, 2021

That’s heartbreaking.

You give it a few numbers and it takes what it wants.

To the government.

In the orchard owner’s cashbox

No cash, Eddie, but it does take Apple Pay.

In the ground, except it’s called fertilizer, water, grub killer, …

Where’s the cheeseburger tree?

You put the money in the farmer, but first it must go through a Byzantine labyrinth of retailers, wholesalers, tax collectors and middlemen before they pay the farmer!

The farmer.. he gets the money to pay the picker, then the truck driver, and the government for allowing him to grow stuff. Sadly, there is not much left over to buy fuel.. so the tree might have to come down to keep his family warm.

Poor Eddie, they still didn’t taught him life.

Just leave it on the ground next to the tree. It will be gone before you know it.

You put the money into the soil in terms of water, fertilizer, and sweat.

In the soil, the water bill, the new pruning shears, and twenty years later you pick up your three year old grandson so he can reach that Fuji apple up there and pick it (a few years after that he’ll be big enough that his parents will allow him to climb up to get one himself.) You bring him inside, you cut up the apple into enough slices that everybody gets some, and you ceremoniously hand him the plate to take around the room to offer everybody a little bit. At the end there is one extra slice and you see him eyeing it but he doesn’t take it, so you thank him for waiting and offer it to him and he devours the last of his apple. You notice his sixteen-month-old baby brother eating around the skin of his and a minute later notice that he seems to have finished, and you wonder, did he actually eat that skin? But you don’t see it—and later you do find where the baby mushed that apple skin off his hands. Between the keys of the piano. Meantime, the big brother goes home with his family on a big airplane and his mommy finds that he’s suddenly very interested in apples and wants to eat them at lunch every day—and he asks her every time for the seeds. Then he asks to go on walks. And over and over on those walks he covertly sneaks apple seeds into their neighbors’ yards because he’s got the concept that big trees grow from small seeds and he wants everybody to have an apple tree too and he wants to pick more of them for them. (He just didn’t quite have that time concept down on that one.) …Thank you for this strip. It brought back such a lovely memory. That grandson is ten now.

It’s like that book, “The Vending Tree”.