Autumn Appreciation

 

Amazing Autumn apples crunchy and sweet. Raw or cooked, in drinks, desserts, breakfast, lunch. If you are seasonally inclined to notice, apples are popping up everywhere and I am delighted. Yes, my coffee is an apple crisp latte and it's delicious, thanks Concord Coffee. I happened upon this new book about the history of apples, and it has been an invitation to imagine all the centuries of apples and learn how they were used and where they have grown. I have been fascinated and my appreciation for apples is deeper than ever because I know some of their story. Did you know that if you take some seeds from a certain type of apple (like Bramley, Gala, or Granny Smith) and plant them, you won't know what kind of apples you will get? Unless you cross pollinate to ensure the same type will grow. It's a bit of a guess. What an apple-y mystery. I imagine and remember my walks through apple orchards, only a couple times have I been able to do that (in Massachusetts and in Kent, England), and each time it was pure magic.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

- from "To Autumn", John Keats

I hear these poetic words in my head when I think of apple orchards. This is always the first poem I think of when the topic of Autumn is upon us. Thanks to John Keats, his short, quiet life in Hampstead, London has gifted us with these words that have offered much fruitfulness since his day. Why poetry? It rustles our imagination and invokes the sheen of gleaming fruits and sweetness of the harvest through words that conjure images in our minds. It is the gift of abundance from our Creator. 

Autumn is harvest and bounty, and yet it is falling leaves, falling apples, and the ideas of dying from a human perspective. It is memory carefully held and drawn upon. Fruitfulness has its season and then it falls. For me, it is a season with loss - today marks 15 years since my Dad's passing. Truly I live in this, in a season of memory, where he is always alive. I was so young/foolish when he passed, and did not truly appreciate all he was, and now I have the rest of my life to appreciate all he was and to honor him and his goodness in my life. 

We cannot have seasons without a feeling of loss somewhere. God blesses us with seasons so that we can round back to it after a year, to reflect on ourselves and thank God for His many gifts. We need these reminders, because we so easily forget ourselves and where we come from. Reflecting on loss can lead to meditations on thankfulness and appreciation for that which we do not have with us anymore, and that which blessed us. May this be a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.