Ahh, the apple. Fine fruit of the forest, or at least the carefully cultivated orchard. Fruit production is largely a messy scientific battle against pests and disease, and the apple trees of my youth – as sour and bitter as they were so sweetly forbidden – did not translate into any love for growing them as an adult. Leave that to the experts and the ones who can afford to keep the villainous insects at bay.
These days I’m happy just picking up a basket and having them on hand to snack on or put into a tart or crumble. If it’s an especially good day Andy might make an apple pie from scratch – a wonder of culinary execution, as he turns a buttery dough into a flaky crust, and the apples melt magically into their sweet sauce. (I’ve never had much success with cooking apples – they’re either hopelessly mushy in overdone overkill or quite crunchy and raw, entirely at odds with the soft slide of a properly-executed dessert confection.)
Their scent reminds me of fall afternoons after school, when we’d return to the garage and smell the white bag of them perfuming the dusty air as the sun slanted into the space and lit up the floating particles like magic. It was one of the happier memories of fall – all coziness and warmth – and though this likely never actually happened, it set to mind scenes of nibbling on a Macintosh while lazily reading a book beneath a brilliantly-hued tree. There were a few such places that might have afforded the opportunity – but if indeed it happened, it was only to eat the apple in a place of beauty – not to juggle the reading of a book along with it. I remember a patch of high field grass near a small grove of pine trees, where the pine needles dropped and dried in the warm afternoon sun, and a collection of pine cones littered the ground. I did stop there once or twice, but only to collect a few of the pine cones. How the space related to the apples, I cannot accurately recall. Memory fades…
