My family loves apples. We like to eat them in pie and cobbler, with cheese and peanut butter, candied, coated with caramel, or baked. I frequently buy a bag of apples only to discover they are gone before I have time to bake a pie.
With autumn her in New England, come the apples. Cold Spring Orchard is about a half hour away from us and has many different types of apples. At the beginning of the season, you can check to see when your favorite will be ripe. They sell the apples already picked and bagged, in bulk as seconds, or our favorite way: Pick your own!
As the weather turns cooler and the leaves start to change, we will make at least one trip to the orchard. We look for a sunny, clear day. Sometimes it will still be warm; often it is a bit nippy out. We will buy two large bags and head out into the orchard on each trip. When our children were smaller, it took considerably longer to fill the bags. Only the two youngest of our seven will come to the orchard. They will eat at least two apples while filling the bags that their father and I will carry.
Beautiful woodlands and farmland, with a beautiful view on the Holyoke Mountain Range in the background, surround the orchard. If we have time and the weather is nice, we may also stop at the Quabbin Reservoir to enjoy the views and have a picnic.
We have picked apples at other orchards, but Cold Spring is our favorite. There are no bells and whistles and “new-fangled” contraptions. A huge storage barn contains the “store” and the storage. You walk out into the orchard to pick your apples, and you can be as quick or as poky as you like. The workers are a combination of students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and folks who have worked there for years.
Each year the apple season heralds the beginnings of the new school year, the autumn, the fall foliage and the cooler weather. It is one of my very favorite times of year, although it is bittersweet. It indicates the passing of time and the changes in the abilities of our children. As they grow, they become more proficient at finding beautiful, ripe apples. They also seem to be less fond of poking around at the orchard, and more impatient to return to the loud, rushing pace that marks our world.
Going to the orchard reminds me of a slower time. Even when I was a child, things moved more slowly. The stores all closed by six o’clock on Saturday. Sundays were family days. The only place open was the convenience store, and you only went there if you were completely out of some staple. We raked leaves as a family before coming inside for a cup of hot tea and a bowl of hot stew. There might have been a football game on the television. Overall, though, those days were a time for family to be together.
Maybe this fall my family and I can capture some of that unhurried pace on the weekends. We can play cards and board games as we eat our fresh apples and sip tea or cocoa. I pray that we can hold on to the innocence of childhood just a little longer as we gather together, and the family trip to the orchard is part of that holding on.
