Apples & Autumn
Where I live, the harvest season can be discouraging in some years and overabundant in others. A year ago, there was an alarming scarcity of both acorns and apples here. Many of the wild animals that relied on having these foods in their diets went into the winter hungry. This year, acorns are more than plentiful, and our apple trees produced a bumper crop, their branches so bowed with fruit that many dropped before they were fully ripened. Apples litter the ground along the roadsides, in the little orchard my husband planted behind our house many years ago, on the lawn, and at the edge of the hayfield between the vegetable garden and the woods.
We have picked as many apples as
