Apple 

I know what fresh apples smell like.  A big box of apples, fresh picked, smell sweet with mysterious spicy undertones.  I can close my eyes and bring up that scent.  It is amazing how smells can take us right back to a time or place.  Or they can simply connate emotions that float just beyond your consciousness.  Like reaching up for that apple above, just out of reach but much too close to get with the apple-picker.  

The apple trees explode with pink blossoms in spring.  They become entirely covered as if by the softest snow.  I have watched expectantly for the very first hint of green between the pink tinted white flowers.  This first green of the new leaves is almost technicolored.  The petals carpet the grass made green by months upon months of rain.  Then come the apples, loads and loads of apples.  So many apples that one tree gets completely neglected - it produces mushy apples.  So many apples that even the guys at the food banks get saucer-eyed when we drop off huge boxes that are only tiny fractions of what still hangs from the trees.  Apples get dried, go into pies and are boiled down into apple sauce.  My mom will pick and pick, coddle us into picking, but we don't get them all.  They fall off as the leaves fall off the trees.  And then the trees stand bare through the winter rains to explode again.  

{26 days of letters.  I have been wanting to challenge myself with some daily writing for a little bit.  I'd like to see if I can write each day for the next 26 days - one for every letter of the alphabet.  To give credit where credit is due - I've borrowed this idea from this blog.}