Starting the year off deliciously...
First, a few statistics:
-Washington produces more apples than any other state.
-Washington produces 60% of all pears consumed in the US.
If you're enjoying a fresh apple or a juicy pear, you should probably be thanking our soil, our farmers, and our fieldworkers.
Despite this abundance, each and every year our local food bank has trouble providing fresh fruit to its customers.
I'm fresh off the heals of my first event, the West Olympia Apple Harvest...or WOAH! I'll give you all the details (how many volunteers, how many pounds, what exactly we did) at the bottom of the post, but I wanted to start with a story.
In the Fall time, more and more often the sky is one seamless gray cloth, heavy and moist from holding back a celestial sea. Each morning will be cooler than the last, and each day the sun will burn through the clouds later than the afternoon that came before. Some days the sun will not puncture the gray sky at all; the thick clouds will hang low in the air, lingering like melancholy.
And amongst the trees: rustling invisibly through the gnarled branches: now and then, when we care to notice it: a scent of cider.
This is harvest weather.
We became a busy people. It happened slowly, this thing of being always busy, of neglecting our laundry on the line, our children, our homes, our trees. For lack of time, our commitments to each other fell away, and our friendships were hollowed out like jack-o-lanterns. We passed each other on the street once with a hug, later with a few words, and then with only a smile and a nod to the ticking watches we each held up. Our community was made of thread and air; a breeze could topple it, a rodent might run off with it.
In some ways, the land is a canvas with its own painter—it crafts its own dreams and nightmares. In other ways, the land is a mirror that reflects our happiness and our sorrows; we reap what we sow. In our case: we reap what we fail to reap.
I don’t know when I stopped noticing. I just know that the apples stayed on the tree branches later and later into the fall with each passing year. Someone forgot to schedule the apple harvest. We left the apples on their branches until they fell to the ground with a rustling of dried leaves. A few refused to fall, and they hung grimly on the gray, leafless branches all winter, like a heart or a kidney dangling from a skeleton.
In piles the apples rotted, the sustenance they promised weeping unconsumed back into the soil. When they weren’t studying or doing homework or on their way to violin lessons, our children played tag or hide-and-seek in the tall grass of the forgotten orchard. Sometimes they would slip in the piles of rot, or land face first in the old mash; for this they would curse and we would punish them for their language.
As the story continues, the apples ferment, squirrels eat them, and the little town is plagued by roving packs of drunken squirrels that eventually force the people from their homes.
Execept for this last bit of hyperbole, the town above could be Olympia, where I live. There were homesteads scattered across this landscape once, and so there are hundreds of apple and pear trees in my neighborhood alone. Mostly, the fruit falls and rots, while the Food Bank requests more fresh fruit.
WOAH organized friends and neighborhood volunteers to glean the apples and pears from the trees of participating homeowners and get them to the Thurston County Food Bank. It happened this year on September 13, and was an awful lot of fun.
I'll end how I began, with a few statistics:
-Number of volunteers participating: 5
-Number of homeowners participating: 9
-Number of trees gleaned: 12
-Pounds of apples we brought to the food bank: 110
-Pounds of pears we brought to the food bank: 90
-Washington produces more apples than any other state.
-Washington produces 60% of all pears consumed in the US.
If you're enjoying a fresh apple or a juicy pear, you should probably be thanking our soil, our farmers, and our fieldworkers.
Despite this abundance, each and every year our local food bank has trouble providing fresh fruit to its customers.
I'm fresh off the heals of my first event, the West Olympia Apple Harvest...or WOAH! I'll give you all the details (how many volunteers, how many pounds, what exactly we did) at the bottom of the post, but I wanted to start with a story.
In the Fall time, more and more often the sky is one seamless gray cloth, heavy and moist from holding back a celestial sea. Each morning will be cooler than the last, and each day the sun will burn through the clouds later than the afternoon that came before. Some days the sun will not puncture the gray sky at all; the thick clouds will hang low in the air, lingering like melancholy.
And amongst the trees: rustling invisibly through the gnarled branches: now and then, when we care to notice it: a scent of cider.
This is harvest weather.
We became a busy people. It happened slowly, this thing of being always busy, of neglecting our laundry on the line, our children, our homes, our trees. For lack of time, our commitments to each other fell away, and our friendships were hollowed out like jack-o-lanterns. We passed each other on the street once with a hug, later with a few words, and then with only a smile and a nod to the ticking watches we each held up. Our community was made of thread and air; a breeze could topple it, a rodent might run off with it.
In some ways, the land is a canvas with its own painter—it crafts its own dreams and nightmares. In other ways, the land is a mirror that reflects our happiness and our sorrows; we reap what we sow. In our case: we reap what we fail to reap.
I don’t know when I stopped noticing. I just know that the apples stayed on the tree branches later and later into the fall with each passing year. Someone forgot to schedule the apple harvest. We left the apples on their branches until they fell to the ground with a rustling of dried leaves. A few refused to fall, and they hung grimly on the gray, leafless branches all winter, like a heart or a kidney dangling from a skeleton.
In piles the apples rotted, the sustenance they promised weeping unconsumed back into the soil. When they weren’t studying or doing homework or on their way to violin lessons, our children played tag or hide-and-seek in the tall grass of the forgotten orchard. Sometimes they would slip in the piles of rot, or land face first in the old mash; for this they would curse and we would punish them for their language.
As the story continues, the apples ferment, squirrels eat them, and the little town is plagued by roving packs of drunken squirrels that eventually force the people from their homes.
Execept for this last bit of hyperbole, the town above could be Olympia, where I live. There were homesteads scattered across this landscape once, and so there are hundreds of apple and pear trees in my neighborhood alone. Mostly, the fruit falls and rots, while the Food Bank requests more fresh fruit.
WOAH organized friends and neighborhood volunteers to glean the apples and pears from the trees of participating homeowners and get them to the Thurston County Food Bank. It happened this year on September 13, and was an awful lot of fun.
I'll end how I began, with a few statistics:
-Number of volunteers participating: 5
-Number of homeowners participating: 9
-Number of trees gleaned: 12
-Pounds of apples we brought to the food bank: 110
-Pounds of pears we brought to the food bank: 90
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