The day we went apple picking was yet another unseasonably hot October day…It is probably the first time we did this in shorts and t-shirts and still complained. It just didn’t seem right. The heat did increase the scent of the apples though, a wonderful cidery scent that you just can’t blame the yellow jackets for being attracted to…a scent that reminds me how I miss an old apple tree that once grew in our backyard, a tree so tall you would need a ladder to pick the apples if they were any good for eating. The yellow jackets loved those apples too.
Apples
by Laurie Lee
Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:
juice-green of July rain,
the black polestar of flowers, the rind
mapped with its crimson stain.
The russet, crab and cottage red
burn to the sun’s hot brass,
then drop like sweat from every branch
and bubble in the grass.
They lie as wanton as they fall,
and where they fall and break,
the stallion clamps his crunching jaws,
the starling stabs his beak.
In each plump gourd the cidery bite
of boys’ teeth tears the skin;
the waltzing wasp consumes his share,
the bent worm enters in.
I, with as easy hunger, take
entire my season’s dole;
welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour,
the hollow and the whole.
