How Do You Like Them Apples?

Oh, Fall in Colorado... School's back in session, the leaves are changing, the weather swings wildly from 84 to 34 degrees, and love is in bloom. Yeah, that last one is normally a spring thing, but it's not only the weather that's backwards here.

Fall is a season of change, and reflection, and blog posts about Topics (with a capital T!) like Truth and Reality. I've been working on this really great analogy about how people are like apples. We have a skin that's pliable and resilient and stays intact even when the fruit is bruised, but how easy it is for a sharp poke to penetrate our tough exteriors and damage us deeply. And how there's so much good substance to all of us--how if we just go past the skin we find the delicious fruit of personality and depth of character and a real beauty on the inside, so to speak. But we also all have these faults that we hide on the inside. Seeds of our own destruction that we work to overcome and to keep from ruining our taste. Then I snapped out of it and realized that philosophy was better left to the expert bloggers.

Instead, I'll stick with what I do best, which is exaggeration and sarcasm.

What's not an exaggeration though, is that our two apple trees have produced 2683579300134764058245 apples this season. This has given our neighbors a reason to talk to us, which they have been eager to do since we moved in. We are, after all, the source of a significant number of rumors.

"I heard they're polygamists...but the kind where she has two husbands!"

"They're never home! That's gotta be a sign of deviancy."

"Maybe that other guy is their kid, and he has some weird condition that makes him look older. Didn't they make a movie about a guy like that?"

"What if they're drug dealers with a meth lab? That one guy is always in the garage."

"Did you know they all have different last names? I know because I checked their mailbox. Do you think they might (gasp) not be married??"

I've been accosted by different neighbors on my way out of my house in the morning no less than three times so that they could ask my last name. Then they catch "that one guy" while he's in the yard and ask his last name, and then say, in mock confusion, "Oh, Bob honey, did we get his wife's last name wrong? I could swear it was something else!" So now the secret is out--we are (gasp) not married. Bring on the social pariah-ism. Fortunately, no one asks about "the other guy", 'cause with many of our neighbors being longtime AARP members, they just might not be able to live with the concept of roommates. Besides, with the new additions to the "family" arriving in January, we have a feeling they have a lot more confusion ahead of them.

So, anyway, the apples. We haven't been able to actually pick many ourselves because they're so high up, and the cripple is, well, crippled. He did get a new splint (pics at the bottom of the post), so that's been helping with the mobility, but still, no apple-picking for him. Instead, we've been telling eager neighbors that they can pick as many as they want--just leave half of whatever they take for us. This was a brilliant idea initially, but now we have 92384127 pounds of apples in the garage, in the kitchen, in buckets in the yard (steal them--please!), and strewn about the backyard...with lots more on the trees still. Our grateful neighbors have given us apple cake, homemade sweet dill pickles, homegrown tomatoes, and a promise of apple cider when it's complete. What a haul! So I've made a lot of applesauce, and we've got plans for many other apple-based items, but I'm thinking maybe we need to be that house that gives out apples at halloween? That'll teach those damn kids that play in our yard without permission. Did I mention that our house is the neighborhood bus stop? And that I have to back out of the garage, at a time of the morning that often finds me driving with my eyes closed, and avoid the children that think the world is a pedestrian crosswalk. At least they will pick my apples for me.

In other apple-related news, the third wheel of our happy little tricycle seems to have found himself a young lady to help us graduate to big kid bikes. (Yeaahhh, analogies.) We met her the other day when we toured the corn maze--and by toured, I mean gimpy pushed our pace from a fast walk to a gentle Olympic sprint to better our time, all the while chastizing kids for taking shortcuts. I tried to take some photos, but photos taken at a 6-minute-mile pace just aren't the same. Anyway, we met the new lady in our lives, and then she even coordinated a dinner-making, board-game-playing evening at our house this week. And we played Apples to Apples! The theme lives on...