More About Apples

I sometimes find the long-ago voices* tell a delightful story. While the words are from another, the photos are my own!

They are wonderful things, these apples: packages put up in convenient size, just about right for a lunch. Their sparkling pulp is spotlessly clean, "untouched by human hands"; filled with its delicious and refreshing juice, yet packed so it does not spill when the container is opened. Solid enough to stand handling well, yet soft enough to open readily and yield its delights to the pressure of the teeth.

They are "non refillable bottles"; their contents germ-free, pure and sanitary. They are cased in waterproof covers, that do not soil readily and are easily cleaned. They are smooth and cool, beautiful decorated with color. Lastly they are given a touch of perfume, delicate, elusive, but irresistible; and then, pleasing to the sight,  the sense of smell, the touch, the taste and the appetite, they are given clearance papers by the 'factory' and are ready for market.

A dozen, a hundred styles and flavors, a full line, for all tastes and for every month in the year, yet every style is a uniform quality, year after, from one or thousands of 'factories' in mass production,

What a marvelous thing it is for trees to do! A tiny seed sprouts in the earth, grows a stem and bears leaves and lets them fall.

For six years or ten, it does this, and then from the bare twigs of winter, from hard wood and bitter bark, the secret which it held deep in its heart from the beginning comes to birth: pink pearls with their crimson flame, that spread into the glory of fragrant bloom, pink and white and lavender, and in them another secret, only to be revealed in months to come.

Bees come and go, and warblers flutter and sing; the petals fall; and the tree that never moves from its place, with only sunshine and rain and summer winds and bits of rock to work with, and the patience of a few short months, gives us such lovely gifts as these!

*These are the words of J.C. Galloway, described as a 'student of nature, well versed in the flora and fauna of the local area'. Mr. Galloway wrote "Nature Notes" for the Port Allegany Reporter newspaper for many a year and was a good friend of my newspaperman grandfather, who often published Galloway's essays in The Potter Enterprise. I shared Galloway's study of buckwheat back in 2022.