The Orchard Tradition

Nothing says September like our annual fall trips to the orchard. I eye the fruit-laden trees seeing quart jars of chunky applesauce, while my children’s taste buds remember last year's free-for-all! Between them, they wrestle the long handle of the unwieldy apple picker hoping that this rosy-blushed specimen wins “pick of the day.”

Honey-crisp, Macoun, Rome Beauty, Pink Lady, Gingergold, Fuji…bushels of choices, not only of apples but also pears and grapes. Two words...sticky sweetness. Mmm, fruit picking. And it's not just fruit picking. It's piling fruit and kids in red wagons, or golf carts and taste testing out-of-hand all varieties at the grower's urging! Tart, spicy, sugar-starched apples. Soft-juice-running-down-your chin pears. It's sitting on an old quilt in the tall grass with bare feet...listening to library books about Johnny Appleseed and wearing the corny green apple glasses we all made prior to the trip. It’s enjoying platefuls of apple kuchen, apple brownies and French apple pie squares made ahead of time. It’s giving the jolly old orchard owner our handmade thank-you cards stamped with a halved apple dipped in paint...

Take your camera along for those postcard moments of the ones you love peeking back at you through the bowery of apples and leaves. At last, when the mid-western heat is at its peak, head to the grape arbor and relax with an icy cider slush.

Pierre Charles Baudleaire once said, “A book is a garden, an orchard, a party…” I say, everyone’s family “book" should have several pages of orchard tradition. What are you waiting for? The scent of apples is on the air!

Mary is an old-fashioned thirty-something wife, homeschooler, and aspiring writer. Her blog, Home-steeped Hope, feeds her love/pursuit of the written non-fiction word while her women's fiction "dreams" wait TBR (to be revised)...