It’s August, Gentle Reader, and that means one thing: BLTs! No wait, that means two things: BLTs, and NFL pre-season games! No, no, no, that’s not it either. BLTs, NFL pre-season games, and the slow-building “why hasn’t hockey started yet” stir-craziness that always creeps in no matter how “over” the Devils we were at the end of the previous season. Last year we channeled that antsiness into a little series we called “3-2-1/1-2-3 Hockey”. Starting today we’ll be counting down to the end of Year 2 of our Project 365 photo-a-day project, and then we’ll be counting up to October 7th, the start of the hockey season. October 7, why, that seems like it’s right around the corner! We mean, would there be Autumn apples like these if October isn’t right around the corner?
3-2-1 Hockey: 21
We started planting apple trees in our front-yard orchard five years ago, with the full expectation that we would never have an actual fruit come from any of them. And the trees have spent the time since then pretty much proving us right. They frequently die, and get shriveled and drought-y every summer, and they all have horrible cedar rust afflictions. But they get beautiful blossoms in the springtime, and we get to refer to the scraggly assortment of baby trees out front as an “orchard”, so what’s not to love? Anyway, this year we noticed that some of those lovely spring blossoms turned into tiny little baby apples. And as spring gave way to summer, those tiny baby apples started to grow into tiny grown-up apples. We figured apple-harvesting was something that had to wait until fall, but then we noticed that squirrels were starting to abscond with them, which is always our indicator that our peaches have ripened, so we had no choice. Either harvest the apples at the seemly ridiculously early date of July 31, or let the squirrels eat them all. Over our dead bodies, squirrels! From our 10 trees we managed a whopping nine apples — a bumper crop! They’re tiny and misshapen and blemished, but they are also shockingly delicious. Who ever would have thunk it?
