Tradition.

Orchard Notes details a brilliant January tradition ...

[T]o proceed to their orchards in the evening, accompanied by their farm servants, and carrying with them a large pitcher or milk-pail filled with cider, with roasted apples hissing therein. They forthwith encircled one of the best bearing trees, and drunk the following toast three times. The remains of the wassailing liquor was then thrown against the trees, under the idea that a fruitful year would be the result.

Here’s to thee, old apple-tree,

Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst, blow,

And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!

Hats-full! caps-full!

Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!

And my pockets full, too! 

Hurra!

Thanks, Mum!

Essential.

Walker's Arms inspired an exploration of the "apple keep."

"The Apple Keep" at Great Chalfield Manor in Wiltshire was designed in the early twentieth century by Sir Harold Brakspear as an apple store and cheese room.  Imagine what that space must have smelled like!

Apples were essential winter sustenance, and preservation was crucial. Techniques included careful harvesting to avoid bruising, storing in cool, dark, and ventilated spaces, and utilizing materials like straw, sawdust, or newspaper to separate layers and absorb moisture. 

Endures.

Wyeth, Cider Apples, 1962

A SHORT HISTORY of the APPLE

The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through

living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.

Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.

Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.

Eve's knees ground in the dirt

of paradise. Newton watching

gravity happen. The history

of apples in each starry core,

every papery chamber's bright

bitter seed. Woody stem

an infant tree. William Tell

and his lucky arrow. Orchards

of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.

Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.

Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.

Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.

The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.

Snow White with poison on her lips.

The buried blades of Halloween.

Budding and grafting. John Chapman

in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward

Expansion. Apple pie. American

as. Hard cider. Winter banana.

Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet

by hives of Britain's honeybees:

white man's flies. O eat. O eat.

Dorianne Laux

Jaws.

Wyeth, Apples on a Bough, Study Before Picking, 1942

Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing.  Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine.  All apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press.

Henry David Thoreau, from Wild Apples

Wind.

Wyeth, Apples, Study before Picking, 1942

To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air.  What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet.  Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.” It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.  The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past.  It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.  I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.  Ah, poor soul, there are many pleasures which you will not know!  The end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.

Henry David Thoreau

Then.

Wyeth, Cider Apples, 1962

And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below, you will fall in darkness.

Ray Bradbury, from Dandelion Wine

Cherish.

Wyeth, Half-bushel, 1959

AFTER APPLE-PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Robert Frost

Typography.

Pleasures.

To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air.  What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet.  Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.” It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.  Thus, the era of the Wild Apple will soon be past.  It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.  I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.  Ah, poor soul, there are many pleasures which you will not know! The end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.

Henry David Thoreau

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