apples and stamps

I'm looking at a small page of apple stamps. (They are U.S. postage stamps, 33 cents each, the current rate for sending postcards.) Four different images - each stamp has a single apple - one round and red, another tilted and green, one in yellows, golds, and rose that could be a Golden Delicious, and another that could be a lumpy Fuji or perhaps a wild crabapple. Each has a leaf on its stem, like little flags and I wonder about the leafy limb that may have borne each apple before it was picked. Fifteen of the twenty stamps still remain.

There's another page before me of 'First-Class Forever' stamps for mailing letters an ounce or less. Cheerful images of 'vintage seed packets' adorn the stamps: calendula, digitalis, linum, alyssum, pinks, cosmos, aster, and primrose.

There's traffic noise outside and slamming doors noise inside and noisy thoughts within me. But somehow postage stamps hold a little magic. The apples seem more real than whatever's making all the noise - they are tangible and organized in their rows on the page and their categorization, and the apples are a little messy in the imperfection of their shapes, and maybe that's a gift from God.

Ask Johnny Appleseed what is most important, or ask the horses, the birds and the bees. It's not what's making all this noise on highways and in hallways.

The seeds and flowers, the fruit we eat, the happy miracles, are products of nature's organized and disorganized ways - nature's messiness and its nurturing of life with unmeasured unpremeditated quantities of sun and water and wind and dirt and excretions and carcasses and birthings.

The apples and flowers are full of good cheer. Maybe the stamps themselves.