Ode to an Apple

Yeah I know that Mom just blogged about apples so you may or may not appreciate another riff on doctor prevention. But I really can’t help myself as I just polished a sample and it sits here reflecting dimly the light from my Apple computer display. And now it is sliced, photographed, and being eaten as I write this. It’s a baking apple and not terribly sweet; obviously a kindred spirit.

As fall frosts into winter, I am glad that I have a box of apples to remind me of the crisp days of the past few months. I have not been able to find really good cooking apples for a while but I stopped by our local orchard retail outlet (where we get all of that sweet corn in late summer) and they had harvested a crop of plump, burnished-red Jonathans. Usually Jonny’s are smallish and you have to peel a lot of them but these are almost Rome-size. There will be pie. And likely an upside-down cake or two coming out of this find. (Mmmm. Cherry apple mixed, we like to call it “chapple.”)

As prelude to fall canning marathons, we used to road trip down to Utah to pick fruit. We would load the back of Big Red (our spacious GMC suburban) with bushels and bushels of apples, pears, peaches, apricots, plums, cherries, grapes . . . I would sit in the back seat, flip the ash trays, then bask in the sweet amalgam of odors rising up from our fruiteous bounty. Then I would get to work because canned or frozen goods are tasty but there is absolutely nothing better than fresh, hand-picked fruits or vegetables. For some inexplicable reason, I was never hungry for dinner when we got back home in Idaho.

When I was young, it seemed that any time I wanted, I would ask mom or one of my sisters to slice me up an apple and they always would. It was always such a treat, made better by the knife-wielding hands of beautiful women who loved me. Today I keep a knife and cutting board in my desk drawer at work and eat apples all through the fall. Without fail, the tart and earthy flavor sends my mind back to “borrowing” unripe undersized green apples from neighboring orchards or to a framed mental picture of my dad “scrumping” an apple or other fruit off the ground near, I believe, any and every fruit tree he ever had proximity to. The look on the man’s face, no matter his age, was youthful, mischievous, and unforgettable. He was always glad to pay for boxes or bushels but he also believed that if it was on the ground, it was a free sample. I completely agree.

This year I begrudgingly planted another apple tree out in the wild part of our property, and a pear tree, one of my wife’s favorite fruits. She got the little starts on clearance, of course, and we finally threw them in the ground. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ll admit it. I love huckleberries because of their rarity, their amazing color, and flavor. But I love apples because they take me home.