Dusk gathered around me, darkening vast forests of trees on either side of the highway. Wide and paved, the highway was silent save for the thrum of my old car, and the occasional evening bird call. Cool fresh air wafting in the car window was somehow different. It was not the familiar smell of prairie dirt or new mown hay. Unfamiliar, yet the aroma was delicious and clean.
***
A small blue Fordson tractor grumbled into the fruit stand bearing a bin of apples, depositing it unceremoniously and returning to the orchard for more. I had never seen so many apples! 400 pounds of apples. Gala apples. Small, red and cream striped with dimpled bottoms, their dainty brown stems the umbilicus separated from the parent tree. Oh, to taste an apple that hadn’t traveled many miles to the prairies for mom to cook down into apple pies, apple sauce and if we were lucky, some saved for fresh eating.
Randomly I chose one from the center of the big, red wooden bin, apple skin smooth and yet grimy with orchard dirt. Sinking my teeth into the tough striped skin, juice squirting to the back of my mouth, my taste buds were bathed in bright, clean apple taste. Later, at the door of the outside cooler where the apples were stored, rushing cold air posed a riddle for my memory that the fresh apple taste had begun. As our work day deepened and dusk approached, silence fell with the evening light.The hesitation in highway sounds from the day was broken by evening bird call. I was transported in time into my car, driving between dusk blackened orchards of fresh fruit waiting to be harvested, returning to Canada, not to the prairies, but to this rumpled province filled with orchards.
Randomly I chose one from the center of the big, red wooden bin, apple skin smooth and yet grimy with orchard dirt. Sinking my teeth into the tough striped skin, juice squirting to the back of my mouth, my taste buds were bathed in bright, clean apple taste. Later, at the door of the outside cooler where the apples were stored, rushing cold air posed a riddle for my memory that the fresh apple taste had begun. As our work day deepened and dusk approached, silence fell with the evening light.The hesitation in highway sounds from the day was broken by evening bird call. I was transported in time into my car, driving between dusk blackened orchards of fresh fruit waiting to be harvested, returning to Canada, not to the prairies, but to this rumpled province filled with orchards.
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory.
Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding
objects and that also frequently strike themselves.”
~ Denis Diderot
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