Just about the time the first liquid amber leaves begin to their change color is Apple Season. The sun has warmed and kissed the fruit long enough to make it blush a deep rose, gold, or yellow. Throughout the world, communities herald the apple harvest and families gather to celebrate this glorious moment by transforming apples into cider, preserves, pies, and other scrumptious delicacies.
The sheer joy of a childhood apple memory is painted by poet Joyce Sutphen in her poem, Apple Season. She has given us permission — “Yes, certainly” — to reprint it here:
Apple Season
The kitchen is sweet with the smell of apples,
big yellow pie apples, light in the hand,
their skins freckled, the stems knobby
and thick with bark, as if the tree
could not bear to let the apple go.
Baskets of apples circle the back door,
fill the porch, cover the kitchen table.
My mother and my grandmother are
running the apple brigade. My mother,
always better with machines, is standing
at the apple peeler; my grandmother,
more at home with a paring knife,
faces her across the breadboard.
My mother takes an apple in her hand,
She pushes it neatly onto the sharp
prong and turns the handle that turns
the apple that swivels the blade pressed
tight against the apple’s side and peels
the skin away in long curling strips that
twist and fall to a bucket on the floor.
The apples, coming off the peeler,
Are winding staircases, little accordions,
slinky toys, jack-in-the-box fruit, until
my grandmother’s paring knife goes slicing
through the rings and they become apple
pies, apple cakes, apple crisp. Soon
they will be married to butter and live with
cinnamon and sugar, happily ever after.*
We invite you to share with us your personal apple stories, past and present, and to savor this Apple Season!
* From Coming Back to the Body. Joyce Sutphen lives in Chaska, Minnesota and teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She is the author of Naming the Stars (2003), Straight Out of View (Beacon Press, 1995), and winner of the 1994 Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Water~Stone, Hayden’s Ferry, Shenandoah, Luna, and others.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
My kind of poem … beauty and food … Great!
Reminds me of our annual fall day trip to the apple orchards in Oak Glen. Piling into the car after the tedium of Sunday school for the drive into the mountains. Crisp and slightly sharp cold air that stung the nostrils, apple presses, fresh cider, hot cocoa and caramel apple treats. Tastes of salty-sweet memories. Thanks!