Apple Pickin'

Ah, that time of year when the Recovering Hoppers go a pickin’.

An hour’s drive north brings us across the border to flowing fields packed and stacked with apple orchards. Every fall now for the past five or six years we’ve gone up for a couple of hours visiting a farm at random for outdoor fun and relaxation.

This year we brought my father-in-law with us. Spent about ninety minutes strolling up and down the groves, picking the best of what appeared to be a bountiful harvest due to the heavy recent rains. Wound up with 54 apples (I, the bag-keeper, kept track) of several varieties: Mutsu, Fuji, Jana Golden, Red Delicious, and Empire, of all shapes (billiard-ball size up to softball size).

Afterwards, my father-in-law and I parked ourselves down in the beer garden for a couple of dark ales while the wife took the little ones into the main barn to get apple donuts. A live band was jamming, and the farm was bustling with hundreds of people. There was a bungee-trampoline jumping thingie for the youngsters, so we laid in the shade on the sloping hill while the girls waited their turns. And boy did they impress: Little One, age 11, did a couple of backflips twenty or twenty-five feet in the air. Patch, age 7, did a backflip every other bounce, even doing three in a row!

We’ve all been eating one or two apples a day, and will continue to do so most likely until Halloween. The wife promised to make an apple cobbler this weekend. And let me tell you, nothing tastes as good as when you bite into an apple that you yourself picked off the tree.

Always a fun time …