"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"

Oscar Wilde, playwright and author

Simple Living, September III 

On this page . . .

An Honest Thought  ❤  Top of the Hill ❤ Back to the Apple House

Back to the Apple House

This north Georgia apple house is my favorite place to buy apples, because it has wide, wooden stairs that take you to a loft area where you can watch the trucks unload their large beds of apples. There's something fascinating about watching apples come to market in huge containers, and the workers transferring them to smaller bins. I always wonder if they like their work as much as I like watching. Maybe not, but I know it smells good!

The Panorama Apple House has about ten varieties of apples for you to taste and choose your favorites. l'm a sweet-apple kind of girl, so the fuji, honeycrisp, and ambrosia are my favorites.

Apples are important in our area, and grow well in the cool mountain foothills. In the fall, apple stands and apple houses line the back roads so that folks like me can take home whole bushels and half-bushels. The concept of buying a bushel ofanythingis exciting to me, especially apples, so I wait for this event every year.

Sometimes I make a batch of apple butter from the sacks I bring home, but what I like best is to simply eat them as is, peeled and sliced with a little bit of peanut butter on top or a sprinkling of salt. What an easy treat, fresh from the orchard!

An Honest Thought 

It's Sunday afternoon on a cool day in early September.  Light rain is falling.  It's good to have Luke's company in this small pocket of quietness that surrounds us both. Given half a chance such as this one, my thoughts meander back and forth from yellow leaves already covering the ground to several herbs still growing in pots along a narrow deck encircling the porch. There's cutting celery, lovage, parsley, peppermint, and sweet woodruff--all of them good companions, just like Luke.

I can't even remember when I last had an afternoon such as this one. Alas, with the kitchen torn up for renovations and strangers in and out  around two overly-happy dogs, the summer ran off  like a team of wild horses with me hanging on for dear life. I've never seen days go by so fast or with such determination. I hope fall will be more to my liking.

My slow time on the porch lasted a long time by this summer's standards, and every minute of it was enjoyed fully. Slowing down helped me remember why I so enjoy what is common and honest around me.  It's easy, isn't it, to push aside the real things, the gentle things that ask for a place in our lives, but they never insist.

Will I ever learn?

*This saturday night is indeed the moon we love and call the    Harvest Moon. To read more about the names of the moon, go    to "Full Moon Rising" under Morsels of Curiosity.

Top of the Hill

The far corners of the property looked abandoned and quiet as I rounded the corner of  "Dead Man's Curve," and "Devil's Hill." The boys named our favorite turns on the twisty route two years ago and painted quick signs on old wood to mark our route.  A sign hangs on the tree at each of the east and west corners.  A third sign is visible in the blueberry bush and reads, "Where the Owl Sits." 

We called the golf cart The Katerra, and it worked well for rounding up our allied armies and shooting at zombies.  The sticks we found along the way were shaved smooth to a creamy white, and used as weapons or magic swords.  My small patchwork garden was mostly trampled then by boys and a hapless guide-dog named Tucker, and was better suited as a zombie graveyard.

That was two and three years ago, as I said.  Such good memories.  

When I came to the top of the first corner yesterday morning, which happens to be on a small hill, my shiny "new" Katerra looking good, I could hear dry leaves crunching under the wheels and smell the wonderful, musty aroma of dampness and brown earth--faintly, but it was there. 

My old friend, autumn.

There was something bittersweet about driving the familiar route alone, just me and September; me and a swallowtail butterfly drifting nearby.  The cicadas had all gone, and both wooden signs sat crooked on their corner trees.  But the sky was blue and wide open.  

"I'm at the top of the hill," I said to myself.  "I've got my Katerra to take me on a new adventure, a sturdy stick that needs some shaving, and a small patch of garden still blooming for me in the night sky."

I think driving downhill into autumn won't be so hard.

For more about autumn, go to . . . 

"I Have a Collection"