Apple picking is synonymous with autumn, even if apples aren’t my favorite fruit. They lack the subtlety of raspberries, if you ask me, and nothing compares to a succulent summer peach. But it’s hard to beat the experience of visiting an orchard on a crisp fall day under brilliant blue skies, as the hills glow with the reds and golds of the season’s foliage and geese fly high overhead.
I make several trips a season to Samascott, our local orchard in Kinderhook, NY, to pick apples for my cousin George and his with Fern – whose apple connoisseurship can sometimes spill over into gluttony – but have the misfortune to live in Manhattan whose supermarket apples are as lifeless as the celebrity dummies in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.
On what turned out to be my final visit of the season to the orchard my daughter Lucy informed me that she and my baby granddaughters Aggie and Faye wanted to tag along. I was excited – I hoped that this would be the first of many apple picking outings together – but also somewhat concerned.
I take pride in selecting the choicest apples and that sometimes requires strenuous reaching, extending to the outer limits of my 6’2” frame; especially come the end of the season when the apples seem the sweetest but most of those on lower, more accessible branches have been picked clean.
Occasionally, I even put myself at physical risk – not that I’d ever climb a tree to reach a prized Gala, honeycrisp or pink lady – so I was concerned that the twins, who we’d have to strap into snugglies, would cramp my style and maybe even suffer injury in my enthusiasm to fill my bags with a half dozen different varieties.
Lucy told me not to worry. She was confident we could both pick apples and give the ten-month-old twins an hour at the orchard without placing me, or more importantly them, in harms way.
In general, I admire my daughter’s common sense. But I don’t think she fully appreciates the lengths I’ll go to snag an inaccessible McIntosh or Golden Delicious warming in the midday sun.
Samascott’s is the same orchard where we took Lucy on her first apple picking outing almost thirty-five years to the day before. Only a few weeks old, I took a memorable photograph of her alongside a huge apple almost identical in size to her head.
We couldn’t find any similarly massive specimens on this outing – my understanding is that the twins are at or near the 100th percentile when it comes to head size – but we did manage to take their pictures in front of the same giant oak tree, the breeze stirring its turning leaves in the brazen midday light.
Trees are reassuring creatures because they change so slowly. It takes them several human lifetimes before they grow from seedlings to maturity, seemingly hover there for decades, and then decay at a gentlemanly pace. The oak at the edge of the orchard, towering over the rows of apple trees, appeared little different than it was when Lucy was born.
But much else has changed about the world. Conflicts rage – though that’s unfortunately nothing new – the Internet and social media have ushered in societal transformations, both good and bad, as profound as the invention of the printing press. Worst of all nature, despite the glory of this particular day, resents that she’s been taken for granted, that humanity didn’t understand that she wasn’t some insensate rock but a living thing, a miracle, and has lately and with increasing ferocity been seeking to remind us.
This is the precarious world that my granddaughters have joined without their consent even though nature has few better, more responsible, friends and stewards than their mother. She works for a park, forages for mushrooms in our woods, and I have no doubt will transmit her reverence for and delight with the natural world to her children.
I suppose I just answered my own question: is this the sort of world you want to bring babies into? The answer is a qualified, if not a resounding, yes. The only way to save the planet for humanity and all other living things is if its most important stakeholders, those with the most skin in the game – the young – are raised to love and respect it, to realize it’s not something apart from us but an inseparable part of us. Harm it and we harm ourselves. Help it and maybe it’s yet repairable.
And there’s no better way to inculcate those values – even though it’s anybody’s guess how much information babies, language still out of reach, process – than by including them in a visit to an apple orchard on a golden autumn day.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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