Confessions of an Aspiring Apple-Picker

The extent of my apple knowledge, I will admit, is limited to Granny Smith, Gala, Red Delicious, Pink Lady, and Fuji apples. Well, and then there was that autumn several years ago that Dad had to go to Montréal for business, and after I begged, cajoled, and whined enough, everyone caved and gave in to my desire for a road trip. On the way back, we stopped outside of Syracuse, New York—another place my parents have called home—at the Beak & Skiff apple farm and picked sixty pounds of Paula Reds. But other than that, I know nothing about apples.

I received a letter (I’ll save my soapbox about the lost art of letter writing for another day) from Tim and Leslie—the couple for whom I’ll be working—today that contained some information about their orchard. In the letter, they included a catalog of their trees for this season, and I’ve been studiously poring over it.

Tim and Leslie grow pears, plums, peaches, and apples. The orchard, at least this year, contains four varieties of pears (one Asian, three European types), four varieties of plums, one variety of peach, and twenty (twenty!) varieties of apples.

The different varieties of pears, plums, and peaches surprised me, because I’ll go ahead and admit my ignorance: I thought a peach was a peach, honestly—and the same goes for pears and plums. But the twenty different types of apples stunned me. I knew there were different varieties of apples, but I’ve never heard of any of these. They have beautiful names: Dudley Crab, Astrakhan, Beacon (regular and dwarf), Canadian Strawberry, Pomme Grise, William’s Pride, Baldwin, Fameuse or Snow, Lady, Liberty, McCouns, Newt Grindle, Tolman Sweet, Belle de Boskoop, Blue Permain, Rhode Island Greening, Hunt Russet, Keepsake, and Northern Spy. Is that not incredible?

I may know nothing about them now, but I assure you, by the time the season is over in mid- to late-November, I’ll be a veritable fount of information regarding apples.

An Apple a Day

There are always places that speak to us, that call to us, that whisper through our memories, our dreams, our hopes. A very Wordsworthian and romantic notion, I realize. And while I’ll admit that I’ve mused about a great many places over the years—Montana, Alaska, France, the Scottish Highlands, the Marquesas Islands, Australia, Italy, Greece, Fair Isle, Norway, Greenland, Mongolia (just to name a small few)—there is a place about which I’ve spent my entire life hearing.

My parents spent a little over a year in Bangor, Maine, in the mid-eighties and loved it: the New England atmosphere, the affable people, the lobster and fried haddock, the philly cheesesteak at the Whig and Courier, the cross-country skiing.

In the seven months I’ve been home, I’ve sent out over one hundred resumes, all to no avail. Perhaps it’s the job market; maybe it’s my less than impressive resume. After a lot of thought—and much resistance to the thought—I’ve decided to go back to school and pursue an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in fiction. I love to write. It’s my passion, my adversary, my obsession. And I cannot think of anything I would rather spend my life doing than filling roomfuls of notebooks and countless documents on my laptop with the written word. There’s nothing more powerful than the word, but that’s a different tangent altogether.

I’ve missed the deadline to begin graduate school in the fall of this year, though, so I’ll begin applying in the next couple of months to several different schools for the 2011 fall term. In the meantime, I’m young, healthy, unattached, and debt-free. And I want an adventure.

Maine has been my current locus of fantasy. Lighthouses, saltbox houses, frigid and snowy winters, crisp falls, small towns, a craggy coastline. There aren’t too many jobs available in Maine, though. Unless one is a lobsterman or a logger—neither of which I possess the skills for. So I took a different approach and searched for seasonal jobs on farms in Maine. And I found this group called the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. MOFGA has an apprenticeship program in which one works for a farm affiliated with their group in exchange for room, board, and a small stipend. To make a long story shorter, I filled out an application on a whim and, in two weeks, I’ll be driving twenty-seven hours across the country to work on an apple orchard from August through November.

I’ll be living within miles of the very place to which E. B. White was referring when he said, “I live in a New England coastal town, somewhere between Nova Scotia and Cuba.” The couple I’ll be working for actually served as curators for his house years ago—it’s how they first became interested in preserving Maine’s heirloom apples.

Since I enjoy spinning a good yarn—fact or fiction—I thought I would create this blog to share with you some of my experiences over the next four months. I don’t know how regularly I’ll be able to post, so don’t hold that against me.

Think of me when you bite into those crisp, juicy apples—I still hold that the tarter, the better, but whichever you prefer—as they come into season.