In the Apple Orchard.

When I was a little girl, we would make an annual trip to a beautiful apple orchard in Wathena KS. We'd load up our 15 passenger van with a multitude of boxes, the diaper bag for the baby and plenty of books for the almost 2 hour drive. Our outing usually fell on a week day so it was in Mom's hands to escort us there and oversee picking the apples. It was in the midst of the years when the Lord was adding to our family every year and there was always a baby. It was no small task to keep all of us children together, let alone on task!! But the reward of an entire apple ALL to ourselves to eat when we were done picking kept us busy filling boxes with crisp red-delicious, tart jonathan and best of all-- golden delicious!!

I remember walking beneath the endless rows and rows of trees as we found the varieties of apples we liked best. The apples still on the tree were worth considerably more, so we picked the nearly perfect windfalls littering the ground. After a full afternoon of picking, it was wrestling the heavy boxes into the van for the drive home; but only after each of us had carefully selected our own perfect apple to snack on. It was a sneaky trick to tilt yourself in the van seat in order to keep your feet up off the open boxes of fresh fruit.

Every year as fall arrives I remember those crisp, perfect autumn days. They remain some of my favorite memories of my childhood. It's been countless years now since we've been back to that Orchard, but picking apples in the fall is still a favorite activity in our family!!

We are now blessed to have apples available locally through friends. It has become a new fun tradition to pick apples with them, and enjoy the apples together!

This year with busy schedules it was a quick morning picking before a storm hit!!

Silas carefully explains to me how to accurately detect if an apple is ripe. "The seeds, those brown things in the middle (I'm not going to touch them, because they look yucky), yes, those seeds in the middle of the apple, they, they will turn brown when the apple is ripe. But you can't see the seeds from the outside of the apple, because apple coats are red; so you can't see through it. So you have to step on the apple really hard, like me, 'cause I've got good boots to step on ripe apples, and then you step on it until it breaks in half and then you can tell what color the seeds are. And if they are brown seeds, I, I, I don't know what color seeds are when they aren't ripe, but they turn brown when they are ripe. And see this apple has brown seeds, so it's a ripe apple, and it would be good to eat. Except I stepped on it, and now it's dirty, so we have to find another apple that I don't step on. Do you understand now?"
:)