Apples Are Wrinkled

During the eight years I worked with Paul Rasch at Wilson’s Orchard I learned a lot about apples. I was offered a chance to return after the coronavirus pandemic, yet I declined. Things had changed too much as they diversified their offerings. They moved from being mostly a seasonal apple orchard to being more of a year-around event destination with multiple big crops available for u-pick, musical entertainment, special dinners, and of course the rebuilt barn that could host a wedding or other special event. It would be difficult to recapture how I felt about my tenure in the earlier years by taking the job. I’m okay with everything.

When my apple trees fruit, I don’t hardly go to the orchard. I can get all the apples I need for a year from the five remaining trees. At the end of each season, regardless of whether I have apples, I buy Gold Rush apples from the orchard because they keep really well in the refrigerator. On Feb. 14, I’m still eating last season’s apples, even though they are getting wrinkled. They seem sweeter now than they did when they were just-picked.

When I have apples, I replenish my stores of applesauce, apple butter, apple cider vinegar, and dried apples. In the beginning, I would process every good apple I grew. A person only needs so much of processed goods. Today I make what I need to replenish the shelves and leave the rest for wildlife to eat fresh and over the winter. Invariably, every apple I leave in a backyard pile is gone by spring.

I’ve gotten to Henry David Thoreau’s view of apples:

Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume they sell in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona, carrying me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.

Thoreau captures something I can’t. I think about this quote every time I take a wrinkled Gold Rush apple from the refrigerator drawer and inhale its perfume.