Not bottled vitamins, though they do provide. The rest of the quote declares in a shaky fashion that maybe at a certain age one a day may lessen your visits to the doctor. All else aside, this is their season; colors, crunch, and cooking. The shape is the same. The color and names vary. From Red Delicious of my childhood to Granny Smith, Fiji, and Honeycrisp to Esopus Spinzenburg which are said to have been a favorite of Thomas Jefferson. The cooking can be to stew, bake in a pie, or a create a special applesauce. An Arkansas relative would send us a box and the odor smelled FALL in capital letters. If a snack on a hike, a non-eaten core can be dropped with impunity, never a worry about the environment.
And then the tree story – there is always a story. July 4, 2001, I was visiting in a small country town in Pennsylvania. A barn across the road anchored the house area and horses roamed in green rolling pastures. Outside a screen porch at the back of the house was a well and an obviously old apple tree. Life that remained was mostly in a curved branch reaching over the well. A limb had been broken on the other side at some point and a gaping hole like a scar had sunken into the trunk as it healed. Yet beyond that sign of age, branches struggled upward and golf to tennis ball apples defined the purpose of the tree. They were still hard, but the top side of a few had a blush as if embarrassed to be caught in the sun. The owner’s comment was “As long as it has life, I want to leave it there.”
A perfect comment to continue to hang in there and serve a purpose. We humans can take it to heart. This fall a bushel may not be our crop, yet what we do offer is a reminder of our roots and what we still produce in our season. Our owner made His own comment about us.
Ye shall know them by their fruits
Matthew 6:17
