it's not like picking blueberries

I've been yearning for a good dose of u-pick blueberry farm. I've been missing the garden I planted in the spring and all the fruit it must be producing. I've been thinking about how much I want to prop up my tomato vines and trim back the leaves to let the sun transform them into juicy red orbs. or how much I would love to make jam or can peppers. But I'm in California where the plums and apricots have all fallen from the trees and the squash are in full force, but they are not mine to pick. And the apples? The trees are sagging with Gravenstein apples, each with their own halo of fallen fruit at the base. And so on Friday when a friend asked if we would like to join in on some apple pressing at the farm, I did not hesitate to say yes.

We got the fly-by intro to making apple juice and jumped right in. We spent the day taking turns climbing trees and picking apples (not to be confused with tennis balls), chopping and grinding and pressing them until they reluctantly separated into juice and piles of peels and cores and seeds. There were bags and buckets of apples in the morning. By the end of the day the buckets were empty, the jars full of juice and the wagon full of apple compost.

My clothes and skin were sticky with apple. And it made me smile. It made me smile because I had been craving some sort of purposeful summer project, like picking blueberries.