CIDER AMBER LIQUID ESSENCE OF AUTUMN

When I pour clarified cider from a clear glass jug into a clear glass tumbler, I feel as if I'm handling the liquid essence of autumn.

If you hold the mouth of the jug at the proper angle the cider comes out gurgling, seemingly with robust but subdued laughter. If you could speak ciderease, you could probably hear it saying, "See what became of 'dem apples?"

The filling glass will well up with amber bubbles, not without a voice of its own, a voice that speaks of the bronzing orchard, blue skies, butterfly wings, bee buzz, cricket song and, if it has been properly cooled, early frost on the orchard grass.

Cider made late in the apple harvest season is the best. The sugar content has reached maturity. It delights the tongue, soothes the throat and calms the mind that thinks back over the season from first blossom to last squeeze of the cider press.

Apple blossoms are, to many, the prettiest of blossoms that make fruit. At first peek of the petals through the surrounding green bud sheaths there is the pearly pink, and you might think the blossoms are going to be all pink. But as the full flower unfolds it is mostly white. Perhaps the first pink tinge is a blush as the buds sit on the threshold of promising, abundant life, wondering if they're going to make it.

Of course it is just meant to be that way, like the constancy of three red feathers atop the flicker's head and no two snowflakes alike, but apple cider makes you dreamy and fairy-like surmise-y.

The blossoms unfold rapidly and present to the world a gigantic, perfumed bouquet, sitting there in a greening meadow, amongst other beauties who have come to the Spring Pippen Festival.

Warming breezes stir their flowered party gowns. Inquisitive robins explore limb crotches for suitable nesting sites. Bees come to keep their covenant. And after the ball is over the trees get down to the serious business of making apples for eating out of hand, making into pies, juice, apple butter, jelly and cider. They are dried, canned, frozen or buried in deep straw-lined pits to survive the winter.

Except for those who tend to the apple trees, they receive little other human attention. It is a sort of leave-them-to-their-apple-making attitude. Some, though, like to sit in the shade of a midsummer apple tree, lean back against the trunk and watch and listen, maybe doze a little, if the grasshoppers, making their high, clicking, golden arches through the air and the beetle song is not too loud. Is there a more pleasant place to be? To think long thoughts about the successes and failures of mankind and what is your part in the betterment of the situation?

Who can sit under an apple tree without thinking of Sir Isaac Newton and how the law of gravity was supposedly popped into his head by a falling apple making contact with his brain? Or Helen Hunt Jackson's poem with the lines, "Trees in the apple orchard with fruit are bending down?"

Such a sitter-under-the-apple-tree might look up and wish for an apple to fall upon his head. Who knows what message or law or plebeian hematoma it might bring or cause!

Then, one day, the orchard passersby might casually glance toward the fruit trees and notice a flush of color is beginning to appear. Is the first blush of the ripening fruit an echo of the first pink showing of the bud? I guess that's not a Newton-apple-head-hitter theory for the Granny Smith apples never blush. Oh well, apple orchards are good places to let the mind wander down fanciful avenues.

Comes harvest. Beautiful word, harvest. It summons up thoughts of gathering in -- gathering in and storing all the goodness of summer. What has been so secretly occurring amongst the green leaves of the apple trees now announces its story in living color. Sunshine, setting fire to the shiny sides of the red globes almost makes it akin to the neon lights that beckons us to Shows Now Appearing.

So, we gather in. We make the pies, the jelly and from a clear glass jug pour the amber liquid into the crystal glass and out it comes, gurgling with laughter that, interpreted, says, "So you enjoyed our show, did you? Cheers!"

REJOICE!