It all began with little green apples.
Aunt Eloise mailed Mom a letter saying the fruit was ready for canning applesauce. Mom loaded up the car with her Mason jars and our suitcases. Dad drove us south to the McCoy farm where we lived the first four years of my life.
Without a care in the world, my sisters, cousins, and I climbed the scraggly trees to fetch a few apples. Sour as can be, we chewed around the worms.
“The apples taste better with salt,” cousin Kathy said.
My mother, aunts Eloise, Alma Leigh, and Dean, laid wood under the shade of a black walnut tree beside the homeplace. They hoisted Granny’s copper cauldron above the logs.
After they gathered chairs and bushels of apples around the pot, they lit the fire. The peeling and laughter commenced.
Without understanding how and why, I knew those women loved my sisters and me because they made us applesauce.
McCoy offspring, we ran willy-nilly while our moms filled the huge copper bowl with apple slices, sugar, and cinnamon. At last, the mouthwatering scent of the steamy, bubbling cauldron called us to our mothers.
“Don’t get too close. You’ll get burned,” they chimed like they did every summer.
But we got too close because we loved to squeal when the hot applesauce popped on our bare bellies and arms. We wore our blisters with pleasure until one-by-one, we lost interest in simmering applesauce.
Twenty-six years later and 500 miles away from the McCoy farm, the little green apple orchard was long gone and forgotten. When Michigan’s apple season arrived on Cummings Street in Berkley, I had no applesauce clan to peel and laugh with. No copper cauldron to set above a blaze.
Yet, I had a bushel of fruit, soup pot, stove, and a basement. And three hungry mouths to feed, as Mom would say.
While the girls raced Big Wheels around the mammoth gravity furnace, I peeled Northern Spys until lunchtime.
Afterward, while her two younger sisters napped in the silent house, one-by-one, my eight-year old handed me crisp Spys, Mom’s favorite pie apple.
Something squeaked.
“What was that?” Becky asked.
I looked up to the basement window above us and under the table and chairs where we worked.
Nothing.
“It’s probably a mouse,” I said.
Becky scooted close to me.
“Are you afraid?”
“No.”
I attempted humor to comfort her. “Perhaps the apples thanked you for being such a good helper.”
She smiled. “They can’t really talk, can they?”
Sounds like a simple question, doesn’t it, dear Reader?
Forty-two years later, overlooking our little orchard from the kitchen window, my husband and I peeled, cored, and sliced about a bushel of Mom’s favorite pie apple.
While I stirred bubbly sauce tinted red with our raspberries, I heard cousin Kathy’s squeal.
I hereby vouch for southern green apples and Northern Spies. They can talk.
They speak of familial love and belly blisters. Of copper pots, basements, and Big Wheels.
The comforting language of apple season.
Contact Iris at irisleeu@sbcglobal.net.
