criss cross applesauce

On Saturday after the first real snow of the season, I helped Dad spread out just-picked apples all over the basement floor. He was afraid they were frozen to the core and past the point of consumption. I was, too. Some of them were brown and dented and puckering with the nighttime prick of Jack Frost. They were anything but pretty. I began to pile the un-pretty ones in a corner to toss. Dad carefully scooped them up and put them back with the rest. "We'll cut the bad out," he said. Or, "We can save this one." I was doubtful.

However deep the frostbite there is good fortune in our future: Last night we sat around the table with the R's and ate delicious apple sauce Mom made with apples from Dad's tree, some of which came from my not-so-pretty pile. I went in for seconds, D Man for thirds. The basement is still covered in apples and Mom might be making apple sauce until June, but it is oh so delicious and makes my Dad very happy. (Who doesn't love an Ugly Duckling ending?)

My uncle has invented apples, new species and families of the word inserted into the ever-known idiom, "An ____ a day keeps the doctor away." He takes a branch from one tree and grafts it into one of a different variety and, after a beautiful process of nature which I don't really understand, there are apples with names like the Pink Lady Delicious and Fuji Grannygolds (I made those up, but that's the idea.) This whole apple craze can be rooted back to great-grandpa Kaspar who lived in the little green house.
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There once was a little green house with a little green door. The little green house sat on a large property of land with an apple orchard. Inside the little green house lived a husband and wife who came to America on a big boat from Germany. Every day the husband would walk passed the apple orchard and down the driveway to his shop where he would make cabinets out of fine wood. Soon his sons joined him in the shop and the orchard, crafting and picking. When his grandsons were old enough, they played football in the field opposite the orchard. The apple trees yielded apples year after year as generations came and went, and family football games were won and lost.

A baseball field was built down the street from the wood shop. In the summer, the shop keeper's great-grandchildren parked alongside the orchard and walked across the street to watch baseball games. Great-grandchildren learned to drive in the parking lot outside the woodworker's shop. There came a day when the wood shop was too small for the shop keeper's expanding company. They decided to sell the property and the little green house with the apple orchard and the big open field for football games. The shop keeper's grandsons uprooted the apple trees, wrapped them up, roots and all, and headed south to transplant them in their own yards. A big bulldozer came and flattened the house, the field and the wood shop.

There is a big new wood shop south of the old one. It is built of fine wood, inside and out. It sits on a hill that looks out over the valley. On a clear night, the lights from the baseball field shine bright white down in the city. Like a distant dot on a map, they are a reference point for finding the old property where it all began. The apple trees are now part of a big orchard at my uncle's house. He brings his apple inventions to family functions. "Try this one," he says, handing over a brown-skinned rough-looking apple. "Sometimes the best tasting ones aren't the prettiest." He's right.