Through Her Mother's Eyes
Applejack takes another step. Slowly, heavily, her hoof drags forward through the dirt. She stops, looks up, feels her neck ache. The sun is in her eyes. She sees one more hill. One more hill to climb. She lets her head fall.
She only needs to climb one more hill. She knows she only needs to climb one more hill. Then she will lie down and close her eyes. One more hill ascended and she will rest.
The sun is hot on her back and her neck and her head and on the dirt beneath her hooves. It had seemed such a blessing once, warm sunshine. She cannot remember when the heat had become so stifling. She feels it everywhere, all the time. It is a fever in her thoughts, in her skin, in her blood. Her coat is damp with warm sweat, and so is her mane, and the sweat is dripping into her eyes. It stings, but she cannot bring herself to lift a hoof to wipe it away, not again. So it falls down her face and drips off her chin. Before it hits the ground it is pushed away by a stinging wind that picks up little bits of dirt from the road to strike her legs.
There is no shelter on the road from the sun’s heat. There are no trees or cottages on the roadside, no clouds in the sky, only the dirt and sparse grass and the road stretching far behind her and the final hill before her. And the sun. Forever, the sun. Its stifling light broods over her like the warm breath of a hungry wolf. There never was any true shelter from its light, she realizes, not that she saw. She had found cool respite and safety in family, friends, and hard work, but the sun had never gone. Always, she had toiled under its glare. And she always would, until the end. The end that is near. The sun had never set. It won’t, she knows, until she climbs one last hill, and she will fall in the dark cold of night. She will rest.
That is all she wants. To lie her head down in cool grass, close her eyes, feel her breath go quiet and steady. She will happily succumb to her weariness, at the top of that hill. She will let her thoughts wander, then drift, then fade. She will embrace the silence of sleep. Quiet and alone and satisfied, she will rest. But not here. She must climb the hill first.
She is so very tired, so very, very tired. Her eyelids are heavy. She can open her eyes only part way anymore. Her tail limply slides in the dirt behind her. Her head hangs down low near the ground. No step forward comes easily. The journey has been long. The rests have been few.
Had she always felt this tired? Had there ever been a time when the desire to sleep was not all consuming and ever present? She has felt tired for all the time she can remember. She tries to think if the weariness had been with her even in those first moments when she first began walking, the very start of her journey, or if there had once been a moment when she felt rested and alert.
But, Applejack finds, she does not know when she began walking. She cannot remember a time when she did not walk along this road, through its twists and turns, down its valleys and over its mountains. She has walked it all her life, it seems, though often times she did not even realize she was walking at all. Often, she hadn’t paid any attention to the walk itself, and the journey seemed to pause. Life seemed to stand still for a time. It never really did. It was never held in static. Even when she took no notice, the scenery had changed. Whenever she took a moment to look about herself, she always found that it all looked different than from before. Her friends had changed. She had changed.
She does know now when the road and her journey will end. She didn’t know for most of her life. She didn’t consider for most of her life that it would have an end. But she is certain now. She is as sure of this as she is of her own name. The end of the road is very near, just over that final hill. It had led to this, always led to this. She will look at what is beyond, and then she will rest. The change will stop with all else. She cannot rest before then.
She will find no cool respite or safety in friends, as she did in the past, because Applejack is alone on the road now, and has been for many months. The alone is as heavy and inescapable and burdensome as the heat. She has not seen another pony, heard any voice but her own, in a long while. The road was not always lonely. She had met others on the road in times past. Most she only saw in passing. They went one way and she another. They saw each other only for a short time. They might have exchanged words or times or feelings, but they then quickly passed each other by. A rare few she walked with for many years, for so long that she had thought they might walk together forever. She counted those few among her closest friends. They didn’t walk with her now.
Some of her friends had themselves chosen to leave. Together, Applejack and a friend, they had come to a crossroad. Applejack always knew exactly which road to take. She always knew exactly which direction she would go. She had always known and always would, a gut feeling. Sometimes, her friends were compelled to go another way, and Applejack knew there was no point in persuading them to take her road. They had their paths just as she has hers. So they had said goodbye to each other then. They had promised to walk with each other again, someday.
Together, they had come to a crossroad. Apart, they had left. Applejack continued always down her own road, the one she had always known she would walk, even if one friend less. In time, the crossroads and the partings occurred on so many occasions that she came to accept them as just another inevitable part of her journey. But even with that acceptance, the partings never hurt any less, and she never felt any less lonely afterwards.
She herself had left her other friends behind. Not by choice. There were few things she wouldn’t have done to keep them by her side, but the weariness had taken them just as it now threatened to take her. The desire to lie down and sleep is nearly overwhelming at times. Applejack had resisted. Her friends had not. Applejack had always been hardier than most. Apples always were. Generations of farm work and homesteading had bred them to be tougher than other ponies.
Her friends were not. After so long on the road, they had simply been unable to walk any further, and nothing she or they could have said or done could change that. Applejack understood the weariness and the never-far desire to fall and rest.
They said goodbye to her and then went to sleep. Applejack wept and then continued on without them.
She is alone on the road now. No one else had made it this far. Of all her friends and of all those she passed by, only she will climb this final hill.
This part of the road, however, is not unfamiliar to her. At least, not to some part of her. Not everything you know you learned learned in a book, Granny Smith had often told her. Some ponies called it instincts or intuition or a gut feeling. That is what Applejack feels when she looks up at that hill. It is like a memory that is not her own, but not one she shares with all of ponykind, for she knows few other ponies have seen this hill. But it is, she is certain, a memory she shares with another, someone close to her.
Her Pa had explained to her once when she was very young how when a pony sees or hears or smells or does something again and again or for a very long time, like walking down a certain road or living in a certain place, that pony becomes so closely familiar with it, and it with them, that they both share a bit of themselves with each other. That experience or place becomes a part of who that pony is. If that pony has foals, like every other part of them, they pass that familiarity down to their foals. Those foals will feel that familiarity when they grow up, and they might call it instinct or intuition or a gut feeling.
He explained that was why the Apple family had lived on Sweet Apple Acres for generations, why he had spent his life there, and why Applejack and Applejack’s foals would spend their lives there, too. To most other ponies, Sweet Apple Acres was just a place, but not to the Apples. To them, Sweet Apple Acres was a part of who they were, as a family and as a father and as a daughter, and it always would be.
Applejack feels a stronger familiarity standing at the base of this hill than she had ever felt while walking among the orchards. It is somewhere more intimately familiar to the Apple family than even Sweet Apple Acres. Apples walked this place long before they settled what would become Ponyville. This hill is a place her Ma and Pa walked before her, and their Mas and Pas before them. It is a place Granny Smith has walked and Big Mac has walked, and a place Apple Bloom will walk and all the other Apples who will come after.
A great feeling of pride wells in Applejack’s chest, and she stands a little straighter against the sun’s glare and the heat and the weariness and the loneliness. This hill and this road are a place of Apples. She is walking in the steps of her parents, and of all the generations that came before her. They all made it up that hill, no matter the weariness they felt. They didn’t rest until they reached the top. An Apple never rests until the job is done.
An Apple will always walk along this road, she can tell from the feeling in her chest, always has and always will, from time’s beginning to time’s end, and every Apple reaches the top of that hill. Applejack feels it deep inside herself. She is not the first and she will not be the last. She is connected to her family here on this road through the flow of time more deeply than she ever was on the Acres. It feels as though she is seeing the road and the dirt and the hill through the eyes of her Ma, and through the eyes of her Ma's Ma, and through eyes of ponies she never met but still knows. She is following her family and her family will follow her.
But she is just so tired, and her head sags again. The weariness is a too-heavy yoke on her neck, an overfull apple cart hitched to her withers, thick leaden horseshoes on her hooves.
She will climb this hill. She groans, breathes heavy, her back shivers, her legs shake. No Apple has ever fallen before reaching the top. When Apple Bloom sees this hill, she will know that Applejack climbed to the top, just as Applejack knows that Big Mac and Granny Smith and her Ma and her Pa climbed to the top. Apple Bloom will draw strength from that knowing just as Applejack does now, and she too will see the summit. That is reason enough. She will not only live up to her namesake, but pave a path for her younger sister, and her foals, and all the rest of her family.
Because of her family and for her family, Applejack promises herself and all the Apples that came before and all the Apples that will come after, she will finish her journey.
With the strength of her family in her heart, Applejack begins to climb.
