APPLES, APPLES EVERYWHERE, EVERY ONE TO EAT

The kitchen is smelling strongly of cinnamon these days. Nutmeg too. I like to try out all the varieties of apples, much to the dismay, I imagine, of the store clerks. Since the apples are priced differently, here one Jonathan in a bag, one Granny Smith in another, one Gala in another and so on. Such a variety looks good in the shallow basket centering the kitchen table.

They all are better with a little tough of cinnamon, sugar and nutmeg. I keep such a sweetened mixture in a small canister. Even eating raw slices, they are better to me if given a quick dip in the spices.

Don't mix apples in a pie, though. You'll have some done just right, some too firm, some mush.

A friend cooks apples for pies and puts them in plastic bags for the freezer, one bag for one pie. Isn't that neat? All the peeling, coring, slicing, seasoning, cooking done in one big apple cooking day. That's efficiency.

A few melted red-hots instead of cinnamon gives the apple pie character. If you put a top crust on the pie, cut a big A for apple in the middle of such crust, the red, sugary juice will bubble up and out and you'll have Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter! The little rivulets will make a lavish richness of curlicued embroidery around the A as did Hester for her letter.

Maiden's Blush, Sheep's Nose, Early Harvest, Russet all old apples. You don't hear of them anymore. Sad, sad. I didn't find any of the green June apples this year either. Are they going, going, gone too? Such June apples were so good, sliced, sweetened and fried, peeling left on. Accompanied by roasting ears, green beans, sliced tomatoes, a slice of country cured ham as big as your hand was early century farm fare. And fair it was.

Edward and I planted four apple trees the first year of our residence here. They grew and produced many bushels of apples. There's nothing left of any of them now except shallow dips in the ground where the stumps finally returned to the soil. Storms and borers took their toll. But from the very first showing of a pinkish white bud, until the last rotting apples on the ground were raked up, the trees were a source of pleasure.

I often took my morning coffee under the apple trees when the blossoms were falling. The petals tangled in my hair, fell on my shoulders and sometimes in my coffee cup. Between sips of coffee I was inclined to hum the old hymn, "Showers of Blessings".

Inevitably when the imperfect apples fell to the ground, there would come the wasps and bees to bore into the juicy center of the fruit. Squirrels came too and little neighborhood boys to have over-ripe apple fights.

In addition to canning apples, Mama and Grandma dried them. The slanting roof of the pantry was the perfect sun-drenched place. The pantry was a small shed-like appendage to the kitchen. A cloth was laid on the roof. Round slices of cored apples were laid thereon and the whole covered with mosquito netting. The apples dried and curled in the heat. Dehydration they call it, but we didn't know the word then.

On a cold winter day, to come home from school and find hot, fried, dried apples pies, suitably seasoned, on the supper table made life worth living.

I'm drying some apples now this old fashioned way, just to see if I can. And also to see if one cold day this winter I can make a suitably edible fried pie.

I know one can buy dried apples pale ghosts, dried no doubt, in some modern dehydrator or oven and examined by some government inspection bureau. But my dried apples are going to be sun soaked, inspected by curiosity-aroused blue jays, mocking birds and maybe butterflies. I'm going to set January 15th as the date for my first fried, dried, apple pie. Something up ahead to look forward to, that's a rule of life.

REJOICE!