Apples

It began as a game to entertain a group of older women. We were given paper and pencil and asked to list the names of as many kinds of apples as we could remember. As the flurry of passing paper and pencils subsided the whispering began and like merry children we had a desire to share the names before they were written down. Bright eyes and smiles of good humor made it seem that apples and their names had pleasant association for us.

“What was the one with the stripe?”
“Ben Davis.”
“Ben Davis.”
“Porter. That was a good apple.”
“Yes, a good apple.”

When the tally was in there were twenty-five names. The fine flavor and quality of the apples was discussed. I asked why we never hear some of these beautiful old names anymore. One woman said, “They can’t take the time and they don’t care that much about them anymore.”

Later, the names kept going through my head. Remember the rough, rusty skin of the Russet and the hard yellow inside? How good they were! Hear the thud of the soft-fleshed yellow Transparent as it falls to the ground. One bite shows the juice so gathered at the core that it really is transparent. In the old homes that housed three generations at once trips to the cellar for apples were frequent. When it was your turn remember how you lit the lamp and whistled your way down into the gloom to the hard packed dirt floor and the barrels of apples that kept well? And the way up through the shadows swelling of Wealthys, Courtlands, Starks?

Crab apples appeared on the table for special occasions, spicy, pickled, still in their little red skins and held daintily by the stem and eaten to the core. The crab apple tree in bloom was like a bridal bouquet.

Red and Yellow Delicious smell as good as they taste. Biting thru the red skin of the McIntosh into the cool white fruit is a pleasure most of us know. The Red Astrican was the first apple to show red in the fall and was a favorite of hungry children although apples didn’t have to be red. Remember eating green apples with salt, or just green apples, and remember green apple sauce? Were dried apples made from Kings, Wealthys, Baldwins?

Skiing home on a warm winter day did you stop and pick a shriveled apple from the tree and suck the thawing brown cider? A snow apple? A Northern Spy?

A Wolf River was a giant of an apple with a beautiful red color, to be eaten, yes, but also to be polished and shined and rubbed to a glow and arranged on platters where they could be seen, like a word fitly spoken, apples of gold in pictures of silver.

The Harvey has a solid name. Who wouldn’t want to try the flavor of the Winesap? Did they send you with a basket to gather wind-fall Pumpkin Sweets before the sharp beaks of the hens found them? Do you remember the boughs hanging low and heavy with Greenings and Bellflowers; the props under the branches of the Bitter Sweets and the Tolman Sweets and climbing the ladder and reaching --- away--- up---there---for the High Top Sweetings?