Apples
Apples
Thinking back, I have lived in places where there are always apples around me. Growing up in Massachusetts, my grandparent’s orchard, which became my parent's later on, the apples were specific varieties of early maturing fruit – so that we Lawrence Academy boys would not be tempted, and the apples would be gone by early September! In the Annapolis Valley, we lived on a farm with not one but two apple orchards, and in Shelburne County and now here in Yarmouth County and Port Maitland our properties have a few apple trees scattered about, being old farms which used to depend on apples as a mainstay storable fruit.
Thus, from early September through to late October when scenes like this come about, an apple tree across the street on the way down to the cemetery, I am immediately transported to various other locations in my mind, in addition to marvelling at the apples in front of me.
Fellow former Concord, MA resident and distant cousin Ralph Waldo Emerson perhaps expressed it best:
“If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and then retire within doors and shut your eyes and press them with your hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light with boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn–flags, and this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural images with which your life has made you acquainted, in your memory, though you know it not; and a thrill of passion flashes light on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as the word of its momentary thought. It is long ere we discover how rich we are.”
