BRATTLEBORO — One recent day, I left home in Brattleboro around 8:30 a.m. and drove north to spend the day with my son and his family. It felt lucky from the start, with sun shining and no sign of rain.
When I arrived, close to three hours later, those night owls - Dave, Heather, and home-schooled Aedan, age 10 -were getting up, making coffee, stirring about in preparation for the day. I never have to leave home at the crack of dawn to show up in time for their breakfast..
They live on a hill in Hardwick, up a steep drive, in a little yellow half of a house. The other half burned down in 1997. The house has undergone many changes over time, but that side of the family has lived there for almost 35 years.
Being there made me feel younger again - more playful and adventurous, with the sense that everything one needed was available right around. Everyone one needed to spend time with was no more than a whisper away. We had planned nothing ahead of time, other than spending the day together.
Smelling crispness in the air, finding a red leaf on the ground, noticing dry seed heads blowing in the wind, Dave finished up his coffee and said, “Let's go down to Paul's and pick wild apples.”
“Can I ride my new bike?” said Aedan. He had already been looping around the dooryard on his black mountain bike. His home school had declared a holiday, and he was ready for a field trip.
There were two old bikes leaning against the back of the house. Dave took a tall three-speed, and I rolled the other one - a beat-up, off-white one-speed with hand brakes - out into the dooryard.
I wondered if I could even remember how to ride a bike.
“How about you, Heather?”
Heather said, “I'm going to do laundry and hang it out. Beautiful day. No rain!”
“You'll do fine, Mom,” said Dave. “But be careful, only the front brake works.”
They rode off down the driveway, and I followed on foot, wheeling the bike by its handlebars. Once on the hard gravel road, Aedan went flying ahead, followed by Dave, and then me, wobbling along, squeeze-testing the front brake every few seconds.
* * *
Paul's apple trees were not far away, although no one passing by in a car would ever have noticed them, close to the road but lost in the dense overgrowth.
We parked our bikes in a ditch, clambered up a weedy bank, and then beat our way over branches and jumble to reach the tall, scraggly, unpruned wild orchard.The trees there were laden with apples.
Aedan climbed up in a tree and shook it. Down came the ripe apples.
The ones freshly fallen were warm from hanging in the sunny air, but the ones that had lain on the ground overnight were cold to the touch. We gathered and bagged the best of the warms and then moved on to the next tree.
Some trees bore sweet red fruit, and some produced sour green, and we took what we could, tossing the wormy and fungus-y ones. Where we walked, we squished fallen apples, until the air around us was apple sharp. Yellowjackets buzzed in for the sweetness.
After dumping all the apples into a basket back at the house, we headed out again on the bikes, on another road past some horses and cattle in a pasture. Aedan led us downhill, shirt-tails flying. I was less wobbly, but still took it slow.
We turned onto a shady, grown-over logging road, muddy after rains, brown burdock bushes on either side.
“There's a nice apple tree in the clearing,” said Dave. “I'll go check it out.” He dumped his bike and bounded ahead, startling a pair of deer browsing fallen apples under the tree.
Aedan and I were puddle jumping through damp grass when Dave came back toward us.
“These apples are too small to bother with,” he said.
He opened his collecting bag; he had already gathered dozens of little green ones. We reached in for a taste, thinking maybe they would be worthwhile, if sweet. Crunched between the teeth, the green skins were rough and tough; the apple meat was juicy, but gave off only pale wisps of flavor.
“Let's give them to the horses and the cows,” said Dave.
And so we did, offering them palms up to the three horses while leaning carefully over the electric fence. The cows stayed back but were happy to mouth up tossed apples from the pasture grass.
* * *
Back in the kitchen, we washed, quartered, and seeded as many apples as we had patience for, threw them into a three-quart pot, and set them simmering. Within an hour, there was a pot of applesauce on the stove, and an apple-scented house, like the old days on the Farm.
In the front garden, Aedan had discovered a stand of tall conical shaggy mane mushrooms, which we knew to be safe to eat.
We collected and cleaned the young ones, and Dave made a mushroom-tomato stew, adding leftover chunks of chicken, and we all ate lunch in the late afternoon, sitting outside at the picnic table in the warm westering sun, with a salad of young lettuce leaves fresh from their garden. Freshly laundered clothes blew in the breeze nearby.
To me, it was a day out of time - or a day lived as days had been lived long ago, when people woke up and smelled the air, glanced at the sky, and decided with few words what that day was meant for.
It was a day lived with little fanfare or planning, where humans and the natural world around them fell easily into the same rhythm, until the line between people and nature became so exceedingly thin as no longer to exist.