Thinking of Apples

I'm never far from nostalgia I suppose. And a change in season always brings it on.

It's been a rough year for many. And one who lost a home and most of their business in a wildfire was our region's most famous and beloved Dixon's Apple Farm.

There won't be loads of their wondrous and sweet champagne apples to haul home this fall, or to ship to loved ones far away. The apple wood bundles we used to gather for our first hearth fires have already been consumed.

For a lot of folks it's an enforced season of an unsettled rest, and then a new beginning. And our own hearts journey with them.

 

It's also nature's time of turning inward, and I'm going with the flow. Picking the last of my own small harvest. Gathering seeds for a new season. Taking joy in the coming of autumn pleasures and its bounty.

Gathering up memories, instead of apple wood, to cheer me by the fire.

After Apple-Picking

by Robert frost 

MY long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Ciao! for now! Jacqueline

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