Apples: a favorite fruit and fragrance ~ October 7, 1993

David Heiller

The apple tree has been good to us this year. It’s half-dead and gnarly the way old apple trees look, like a bent old man. But it keeps on giving good fruit year after year. It gives us other pleasures too.

I don’t know what kind of tree it is. It starts bearing fruit by mid-August. A lot of apples go to waste on the ground then. We aren’t ready for them, and they are tart.

But by mid-September the ones that have survived the thunderstorms and climbing kids are big and sweet. The insides are very white. They start to turn brown within a few minutes after you cut them or take a bite.

Tyson and Malika

My daughter Mollie and her friend and I picked the tree three weeks ago. I got out the step ladder, which is old and shaky. One of the kids would climb as high as she could, while I held the ladder, and passed the apples down to the other kid, who put them in a bucket.

It wasn’t the most efficient way to pick apples, but it was fun, especially for the kid on top of the ladder, all stretched out, reaching that extra inch to get chubby fingers around a big red ap­ple. Sometimes I would shake the ladder just a little then, and they would jerk and laugh. We filled two five-gallon buckets. I put them in the sauna, where they stay cool most of the time. They’re just the right temperature. Not so cold they freeze your teeth, like from the refrigerator. And they fill the sauna with the smell of apples, which is a pleasant smell indeed.

Every day we grab a couple apples from the sauna. We take them to work. We eat them while we work in the garden, or on bike rides and walks. They taste real good in the woods on the tractor too, with a sore back and a trailer full of firewood.

It froze hard Friday night, October first: 23 degrees, our thermometer said.
The apples still left on the tree didn’t take it too kindly. Their skin blotched. The insides were no longer such a perfect white. But they were still sweet. So my son Noah and I borrowed an apple picker from a friend on Sunday and picked the few that we couldn’t reach from the ground or the shaky ladder.

Brooks, Noah, Ida and APPLES! 

An apple picker is an interesting invention. It has a wire basket on one end that is half open, with wires over half that stick up like crooked fingers. You hook the apple with these fingers, and the apple falls into the basket. It’s on a handle that has three parts. When you put them together, you can reach up about 12 feet.

I picked the apples from the top of the tree, then lowered the basket to Noah, who put them in a bucket. Some of them weren’t as good as they looked. They had sores and scrapes. They , almost filled a five gallon bucket. I stood in the back of the pickup to get the highest ones. A few we couldn’t reach at all. It’s good to leave some for the birds.

I was pretty proud until I backed the truck over the bucket. Then quite a few of them had even more bumps and bruises. I carried them inside, and set them on the kitchen floor with a sheepish look. Cindy was making bread. She didn’t have a sheepish look. Making apple sauce had been added to her list of Sunday chores. Gee, thanks, Dave.

I spent the next couple hours in the woods, cutting firewood and keeping out of Cindy’s way. It was safer to be around a chainsaw. When I came in the house, the apple sauce was on the stove. Cindy asked me to taste it. She didn’t have to ask twice. I smiled. It was delicious, red and smooth and sweet.

After supper, the kids wanted apple sauce and ice cream for a treat, so Cindy made another batch. This kind was clear and chunky—and delicious. Cindy smiled this time. Hot apple sauce and ice cream is a hard treat to beat. I had a bowl too.

Then Mollie asked for an apple after she had brushed her teeth. Cindy said yes. She figures you can’t go wrong with apples, even after you brush your teeth.

That reminded me of when I was a kid. We always had apples in the house. We kept them in the root cellar. It had a dirt floor and stone walls. Apples seemed to stay fresh there for months. Their smell would hang in the air like perfume, like in the sauna and in our lives.

I’m grateful for the simple pleasures that an apple tree can bring.