The flowering crab apple tree outside my window was once perfectly symmetrical, with two stout lateral branches on either side of the main trunk. Our daughters, in their childhood days, loved to climb and play on those.</p><p>Then one night, years ago, it was a casualty of a winter storm. We woke that next morning to find both branches on one side broken off and lying in a tangle of ice-sheathed ruin.</p><p>With that misfortune it had become only half a tree, if that.</p><p>Testimony from tree experts was mixed. &ldquo;You&rsquo;d just as well cut it down,&rdquo; said one. &ldquo;It&rsquo;ll never amount to anything again.&rdquo;</p><p>Another suggested we might give it a bit of time. &ldquo;It won&rsquo;t be like it was, but new branches might fill in that hole a bit.&rdquo;</p><p>Time flew by, as happens. The hoped-for new branches did not appear. Though larger now, the tree still is as lopsided as ever.</p><p>A short way across the yard there&rsquo;s another crab tree, one that somehow escaped the storm&rsquo;s ruin. But the blooms of that one are pale pink and its tiny green apples are smaller than marbles.</p><p>The broken tree always was the better of the two &mdash; its springtime flowering a glory, the blossoms a deep, rich scarlet. And the apples it makes, though only a bit larger, are brilliant red.</p><p>The recent unseasonable run of chilly mornings, as August drew toward its end, must have evoked in wild creatures a sense of the harder season to come.</p><p>At least one of them &mdash; the squirrel that I see in the first hours of every day &mdash; has been busy laying on fat against those lean months that lie ahead.</p><p>Shortly after daylight he comes to work at his harvest. There are squirrels that gather walnuts from a tree behind the house. But this one &mdash; always only one, and thus I think the <em>same</em> one &mdash; clearly prefers crab apples, and always the red ones from the misshapen tree.</p><p>He is there as I write this &mdash; in the very topmost branches, at a height that, in proportion to size, would be something like a 20-story building for a human.</p><p>In earlier pickings he&rsquo;s already collected the ones nearer the trunk, reachable from the sturdier branches. Those that remain are higher up and farther out, where the risk is greater.</p><p>He must be untroubled by acrophobia. Or maybe it&rsquo;s just that he understands how cruel winter can be for the unprepared.</p><p>I see him now, clinging with his hind feet to a limber twig that sways as he reaches for an apple on the twig below. Now he has the prize in his mouth. And with a move that would do credit to a circus trapeze artist, he lets go his grip, contorts himself in mid-fall, catches hold of a branch lower down and resumes his picking there.</p><p>To say he&rsquo;s gifted is an understatement. Or is he driven by the memory of past Januarys? Need is a persuasive teacher.</p><p>I went out a moment ago to sample one of those little red apples, and can report that it is somewhat on the woody side, rather more sour than sweet.</p><p>But clearly that squirrel can taste in them the promise of his tomorrows. He does not notice or care that the tree that bore them is deformed, and neither do I.</p><p>I&rsquo;m glad we decided to let it stand.