Posts Tagged → apple
Sweet Fall is in the Air
Fall may be my favorite time of year, for umpteen reasons, only a few of which come to mind at any given moment. Until I walk outside and then recall another dozen reasons.
Clean air, freshly scented with a hearty, earthy smell fills the streets and woods alike.
Sunlight strong enough to throw objects into clear relief, but not strong enough to make you uncomfortably hot.
Cool nights, asking in the back of your head “Did you split and stack enough firewood for the long cold winter that is coming?”
Leaves turning from verdant to golden and scarlet.
Apples ripen, begging to be eaten, baked, distilled. Hard cider is popular everywhere around here, and applejack is even more popular.
Wild game begins to prick up its ears, sensing the change to leaner times is on that new wind, bringing with it hungry predators.
As a predator, my own senses begin to naturally sharpen. Tree stands are checked, shooting lanes trimmed. Hunts are planned with friends near and far.
Successful or not in taking something home, a hunt is time afield, with nature. Cannot beat that.
Enjoy Fall, friends, as it is also a metaphor for change, the end of growing things, harvesting of crops, aging, and sometimes the death that naturally follows the aging process. It is a pleasing reminder that our time here on Earth is simply fleeting.
Fall is a reminder to make every moment count, and make every moment positive to make it count the best and the most.
The spy in my pocket
So after a year of prompts and warnings and threats, I updated the operating system on my iPhone. According to Apple, my iPhone was no longer a member of the 21st century, but had begun to operate in the Stone Age.
More concerning to me, being a happy Stone Ager myself, was the increasing likelihood that Apple would simply detonate the phone from afar, as it had become a liability for THE SYSTEM. Whatever that is.
So I updated. Using our home wifi, I babysat my blinking, chirping brilliant iPhone for about eighteen hours, until it demonstrated it was no longer brachiating, but in fact was walking upright, like all modern bipeds. Good, so far so good, I thought.
When I turned it ON, what eventually emerged from the long sleep was a totally different animal than the one that had been so cheerfully helpful just a day before. What we had now was a failure to communicate, as I realized too late my mistake in allowing my pet to morph into a nattering little nabob of negativity, full of admonitions that deleting worthless photos could easily lead to the loss of all my photos, good and bad, desirable and deletable.
Also turned out that the phone was set to “spy” mode from the get-go.
That is, everything in it that could be used to share my information, track my location, disseminate my photos, and otherwise divulge everything about how I use the phone was set to GO. It took me dang near a week to figure out which switches and buttons to throw in order to eliminate the most egregious spying, but I know there are still parts of the iPhone dedicated to watching me and reporting back to Apple on all my choices. Especially the regrettable ones.
So here I have what was once a friendly and useful pet, and now an annoying little North Korean minder in my pocket. It watches everything I do, type, and say, and although I have done all I could to not share certain things with people who have no business seeing what is on my phone, it nonetheless threatens to destroy everything if I change one photon of how it is now set up.
I don’t know about you, but I lead a pretty simple life, and I really don’t have a lot to hide. But what I do have to hide I really want hidden. No, I do not want to link the iPhone directly to my bank accounts. No, I do not want to automatically share with the world via snapchat, facebook, twitter and etc every photo I take. And so on.
At some point I will tire of being spied upon by Apple, and I will throw this thing into a fire with lots of gasoline to help it along into the dark hell from which it came. And then I will go back to the Stone Age, that happy time when your flip phone simply called people from a list who you wanted to talk with, and it could text them, too, in really important moments, if need be.
Oh, how I long for the days of the antique Flip Phone. It was not a spy in my pocket, but a useful tool, like my pocket knife, also from the Stone Age.
Natural abundance right now
Natural abundance surrounds us now. Apples, chestnuts, corn, osage orange “brainfruit,” and much much more. We scramble every day to snag wild apples along road sides, pick up chestnuts up the street before the squirrels eat them, and toss a few funky looking “brains” from a Lancaster farm road into the truck bed.
All with the intention of planting them on rural properties we manage.
By introducing new seeds to a given piece of land, we increase the species diversity and DNA stock on that piece of land. Like Johnny Appleseed of old, we kick open holes in the dirt and pat a seed or apple core into place.
True, turkeys, bears, deer, chipmunks, and squirrels will eat much of what we plant. But if we do enough, some will survive.
And from there they will grow into trees and shrubs, feeding wildlife and people in the future, thereby perpetuating nature’s abundance.
Quiet little discoveries await
Marking a boundary up in the woods today, I encountered an ancient little field that had once provided hay and pasture for cattle. It is on a steep hillside, so it must have been hell to farm, but in this supremely quiet, gentle nook of a place, there is another surprise to go with this small, welcome surprise.
Along several hundred feet of the field margin are fruit and nut trees, lovingly planted long, long ago. Walnut, butternut, American chestnut, various apples, all in various stages of death and decay, but still clinging to life amid brambles and a towering, sunlight-hungry forest canopy all around.
Finding these old signs that someone loved and tended to this land in such a personal way feels reassuring, because baby, if you are watching the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, France, London, there ain’t a whole lotta lovin’ goin’ on out there. Hate and calculated grabs for power seem to dominate. Finding this little sidebar of a postage stamp of Earth gave me some breathing room. It felt good.
Thank you, old farmer from 100 years ago. I enjoyed the peace and tranquility you intended for someone to have at some point here, if only for ten minutes. I will return again, eat an apple on an old stump, and look out at your creation. You never anticipated mile-a-minute weed, did you? Crushing that invasive weed there will be my contribution to your special spot, old farmer.
Fall weather has its benefits
Cool fall weather has benefits: We sleep more comfortably at night, fewer bugs pester us, the lawn grows more slowly and requires less frequent visits with the mower.
Another benefit is that food left for several days inside a vehicle doesn’t go bad. For example, the half-gnawed apple that my son left in the back seat of the truck during a recent fishing trip wasn’t in too bad shape. After slicing off the gnarly chewed sides, I was able to have a healthy midnight snack of about 0.65% of a whole apple.
Thanks, Mother Nature!
Josh