And now, though I was not up in the appletree, I had found various salients in our half acre that allowed me to see a good deal of her at night, when she went to bed.
From the shadow of the garage, I beheld the back yard, with its Norwegian maples, the tilted white birches, the ancient appletree whose branches touched the windows of the family room, and for the first time, it seemed, I understood the green glory of this acreage as something indifferent to human life and quite apart from the Victorian manse set upon it.
White apple blossoms had begun to appear in the old tree, and I read the pale light in the sky as the shy illumination of a world to which I had yet to be introduced.