apples

This weekend my mom took me and Jon to an apple orchard. A friend of our family owns the orchard. It is impossible to visit without entertaining the notion of living exactly that life. When we were little, their daughters taught us how to play tetherball. Until then, we thought tetherball was just a game that bears played in The Far Side comics by Gary Larson. The shop attached to their home is full of temptations. Sugar wafers for 88 cents a pack, sparkling bottled fruit juices, homemade jams and jellies, infused oils and buttery caramels. Not to mention the perfume of bags and bags of fresh picked apples. I bought orange marmalade and a giant jug of honey. Mom loaded up on honeycrisp apples. We ate apples the whole way home. Everyone passed me their cores because I eat them down the farthest. At home, I helped mom wrap each individual apple in a half sheet of newspaper. Mom keeps these in the basement refrigerator that is unplugged. When I opened the fridge to stock up the apples, I found it nearly full of apples already. If it had been anything else, I would think my mom has a problem. But as it was, I thought to myself that there is nothing wrong with having an old refrigerator in your basement so chock full of apples that you could catch the thick sweet smell of them in a jar.