Fallen Apples

Earlier this summer I wrote about creating a spot to sit in under the deep shade of our aspen trees. It's by my potting bench, up against the neighbor's fence, just a place for me to rest. 

What I didn't mention is that in addition to the aspen trees, the table and chairs are overtopped by an apple tree in my neighbor's yard. Lovely and leafy, and . . . 

      . . . dropping fruit.

Their apple tree is right at the fence and it reaches over. Last year's wet summer season, followed by a dry summer this year, has created a bounty crop and green apples are falling all over my side of the fence.

It's easy enough to pick them up, which I need to do before they rot and attract mice and begin to smell. But cleaning up fallen apples is something of a trigger for me.

Because I grew up in an apple orchard. 

My sisters got a kick out of my July post with blurry old photos of Grandpa's lake house in Wisconsin, so here are some more blurry photos, this time of the apple trees in the yard we all grew up in.

Our little white house was built in a 1950s subdivision of small homes plopped on the hills of an old apple orchard in central Connecticut. Italian farmers had long cultivated these hills, and still did then, but this old fruit farm got sold off for booming post-war housing.

The trees were big, gnarled, and low branched, and there were probably 6 or 8 still left on our little half acre after the house went in. 

They were no longer tended, but they still produced fruit -- which had to be raked up and disposed of before my Dad could mow the lawn. There were apples everywhere on the ground, rotting, messy and annoying.

And we kids had to pick them up, raking them onto a tarp and hauling them to a big rotting pile. I hated that chore. It was relentless all summer and smelly and there were yellowjacket hornets all over them. Seeing fallen apples still makes me think of the unpleasantness of all that.

But there were nice things about living in an old orchard too. The low branches were great for climbing and hanging a swing from.

The May apple blossoms were gorgeous, although I have no old blurry photos of our yard in full bloom. I thought I did, I remember it so well, but I couldn't find any snapshots of the profusion of white flowers that transformed our half acre each spring.

My mother canned apples some years, using the best of the fruits, not the rotten fallen ones. They weren't good eating apples or baking apples either, but they were okay preserved or sauced. 

And I remember going with my father to take bushels of raked up apples to the cider mill on Main Street, to an ancient wooden cider press that mashed and strained the mess into clear golden liquid. That was fascinating to watch, and to taste.

The trees were old and brittle and storms took out limbs and eventually whole trees. The little white Cape Cod house was painted, a corner addition added on, and only a tree or two remained in the yard, one with an old basketball hoop still attached as I grew up and moved away.

Seeing fallen apples from my neighbor's tree landing on my little shady sitting spot has triggered memories, both pleasant and not, of growing up in an old orchard. I hated the mess of fruit drop, but loved the flowering springtime beauty and the days spent shooting hoops, swinging and climbing on those crooked trees.