Fruitslinger

I almost can’t bear to think of apples. Because apples mean autumn. And autumn means winter. And it’s barely even summer.

And here I was picking apples.

“Lupe, I’m going to go pick apples.”

“You’re going to pick apples?”

“Yes, I need some that aren’t quite ready yet.”

“Well, all of them have some time.”

“I know. That’s fine. I need some that are unripe.”

One of Lupe’s many virtues is that he doesn’t ask a lot of questions.

If he had asked, I could have told him about how Christine Ferber’s jam cookbook often calls for the addition of a little green apple jelly made from unripe apples, because unripe apples have a lot of pectin in them, and pectin is what makes jam set, and how you have to love a cookbook that requires you to start a recipe a season in advance.

But Lupe was holding a chainsaw. So I decided to leave him alone.

The apples didn’t come willingly off the tree. I had to tug hard to wrestle them from the branches.

With a few pounds of apples, I walked back to the house. I set my bag of apples on the porch.

I walked to the edge of the orchard, toward the scraggly collection of bushes and weeds and wild berries and fallen trees.

I reached for a black raspberry and let the sweet, inky berry dissolve on my tongue.

So many months to come of little else but apples. But it is, for a while at least, still summer.