Good morning all and welcome to what looks to be the start of a long stretch of rain. At the moment the sky is heavy, the air is thick and only a few exploratory drops have splashed down. However the weather men are confident that rain will be here soon and stick around for a few days. Given the storms hitting the coast and general weather patterns, I’d say they have a good chance of being right. Which means instead of trying to make certain the plants in my garden don’t dry into crispy fried leaves, I now have to try and make certain they don’t drown. Should be fun. I always love that point in the summer time. Every summer there is always a time of heavy rains. And each year I adjust the plantings to try and deal with it. At the moment we get to see if this year’s attempt was successful. As all I can do is wait and see, we might as well get on with a writing prompt before lightning crackles and thunder stomps on the day. Timer’s set for fifteen minutes? Good, then let’s get going.
This was a slow start and I think it would need a lot of work, but I kind of like the apple scene. It could be fun to play around with as part of another story. As soon as I finished writing it though I saw places I wanted to adjust and rearrange. Which is a good sign that I’ll probably fiddle with it at a later point. For now, into the files it goes.
Thursday, July 8th: We picked apples.
We picked apples. It seemed like a wholesome enough activity. Lots of physical exercise in the sunshine. Other families doing the same thing. We could have time to bond. I think the intention was to talk while we worked, spending time alone in the vast orchard.
Cell phone service was particularly spotty and there was little point in most of the electronics that usually took our attention. In fact all of us were asked to leave them in the car. And so in jeans and long sleeved shirts we trouped into the orchards for a bonding experience.
It soon turned out that we had little to talk about. One would raise a question and it would be answered. Occasionally there would be follow up questions but nothing really devolved into actual conversation.
To add insult, we worked next to a particularly chatty family who seemed to be having the time of their lives. One of the kits would pick an apple and scamper down the ladder with the prize in hand. As he placed it in the basket as praise for picking one of the best specimens in the orchard were rained down upon him by overly cheerful adults.
With their example present, Uncle Harvey tried. I picked an apple. It was a good looking apple. It was ripe and ready to be taken home with no bruising or softer mealy bits. But it didn’t look magical. It looked like an apple.
“Nice apple there,” Uncle Harvey said looking at it in my hand. “Way to go with picking the ripe but not rotten ones.”
The rest of us looked at him and he shrugged, turning to scamper up the ladder and recover in the trees canopy. Whatever gene contained an overenthusiasm for the mundane, our family didn’t possess it. So we compensated by picking more apples. Breath was saved for the apple picking and we climbed more ladders and picked more apples than we intended.
In the end when the over enthusiasts working next to us trundled off with their one basket of perfection, each of us had our own filled basket. We trouped off in a conga line back to the office, paying for and loading our apples in the car. For a brief moment we felt somewhat victorious.
Then we got home and realized we had a lot of apples to deal with.
Food didn’t go to waste in our house. So the thought of not putting the apples to use was not something that entered into anyone’s mind. Instead we took the night to list anything apple related that we might like to eat or try.
The next morning we got to work. Some apples were marked for eating, the rest were processed. Apple butter, apple chutney, pie filling that could be vaccu-sealed and frozen, and apple sauce soon began to fill the freezer and pantry. The house took on a sweet and spicy air. In addition the stiffness faded from our conversations as we dealt with the effects of our own version of keeping up with the Jones Family.
Ten til Midnight 