Not long after my college girlfriend informed that her first word was “apple,” Joel came home from a day at Grammy’s house saying “apple” over and over. I had thought it a peculiar word to commence speaking. Today, I peaked in on my two little rascals in the garage where I had let them play and they were both perched on our riding lawn-mower and down to the core eating apples left over from my two day canning spree with my sister. I guess apples and youngsters do get along well together.

Stella’s Dream is a bucolic farm on the outskirts of Sugarloaf Mountain. Mr. Pepe diligently tends his perfectly spaced trees day after day only to give them away to his friends, amongst whom my family is prized to be called.  Grandimary Howard, Mama, Jenny, Kendra, Jesse, Seth, Joseph, Trina, and Karl and Alyssa Hjembo’s family carrivanned to the orchard with my mom’s many 1/2 bushel buckets in tow. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows on the mown lawns around us as we all sampled the sweet yellow apples. Kendra and I agreed to meet the following day to put up our pickings. We were both equally ambitious, wanting roughly 50 quarts each for our little families. Jesse was probably our best asset when it came to getting all the apples down from the trees. He used an apple picker, shook the branches vigorously and the trees dropped their produce. My hands quickly tired from my inferior method of hanging out of the tree middle while trying the shake the branch I was holding. Joel and Chalice were delighted with all the apples around them as long as they could avoid standing under the trees that were being shaken. Before going to bed, I garnered my many supplies from the Howard family menagerie. I was planning on purchasing jars, but Mama told me I cold have as many jars as my heart desired! So the only thing Kendra and I needed to purchase were the dome lids to seal the jars.

The next morning (Wednesday) Kendra arrived before 7:30AM having already changed a flat tire! We worked steadily, scrubbing, quartering and removing bad spots from our many apples. We were quite the domestic young housewives. I periodically charged into the kids room to change a diaper or wipe a bottom and administer marshmallows. The kids took long naps and cooperated nicely with our applesauce canning efforts. Kendra and I experienced the joys of watching caramel colored applesauce stream from the nifty “squeezo” as Kendra cranked and I filled the jars, cleaned the rims and lowered the jars into the Amish 15-jar canner. We let out a little cheer each time a jar lid popped indicating that our work was successful and the jar had sealed. All 75 of the quarts we processed canned successfully. I got an early reprieve the second day because I had company coming at 6 for dinner so Kendra and Jesse whisked away the supplies around 5:30 and David and I enjoyed our evening with friends!

Hours of apples left my fingernails short and my fingers sore and brown! But I still had about a bushel of apples left over. David mentioned to his boss that I’d been canning applesauce. Mr. Hall soon gave us another half bushel of beautiful apples from his orchard in Pennsylvania. There will be no dearth of apple pies, tarts, apple crisp, apples and peanut butter at this house! Amy kindly volunteered to help me finish out the last bushel of apples yesterday, which I froze and refrigerated as applesauce. That will allow me to store my canned quarts for weeks to come.