Apple Time!

After Apple Picking
by Robert Frost

“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….”

I thought this picture captured the beginning stanza of this poem so well! I had no idea that ladders for apple-picking have only two (3?) legs! yikes! OK, the one is pretty wide... but still, the other one is just a pole!

Natalie and I drove up just north of Placerville to visit Abel’s Apple Acres- the first of the beautiful fruit ranches along “Apple Hill Road.” Unlike the poem, however, we are not done picking our apples---we want to go back! As we toured through the orchards I thought of the scenes in Anne of Green Gables and the bushels of apples delightfully picked in the late afternoon sun. The day we were there still felt like summer, and was quite warm; summer’s last little dalliance with us, I guess. Since then, we have had some cool weather appear to reassure everyone that fall is still on her way. Maybe we can make the trip up to Apple Hill in a couple weeks accompanied by some authentic apple-picking weather!

I’ve been reading the book, Things Unseen by Mark Buchanan and really enjoying it. Again a book that puts life in perspective and lays out what we should have our eyes on as Christians. (hmm, there seems to be a pattern here in my reading …)
Here is an excerpt from the book. The chapter is titled, “Dead Already” based on Col. 3:2-3, “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”

"Be in the world, just not of it. Make your mindset heaven, but don’t shun earth. Indeed, seek to live abundantly here and now---to savor earth’s good things, it’s sweet fruits and white waters and warm beds,…
Just never reduce your life’s purpose to the here and now. Earthly minded people do that….They never look up.”

Spending the day at Apple Hill was a day well spent in savoring the earth’s good things.