Fall Goals

SPACE CAMP!!!!

Hello Reader!  I have been trying to keep to a Sunday-posting schedule, but in recent weeks this hasn’t worked out so well—my apologies.  First it didn’t work cuz I WENT TO ADULT SPACE CAMP (!!!!!) which was SUPER awesome but this isn’t that post, that post is yet to come.  THIS post is what happens when I went out of town for a weekend which threw my whole life schedule sideways and I spent the following weekend just trying to pull it back together but we’re not quite there yet.  My “pull it together” efforts will continue to fail, at least for the time being—I’m out of town next weekend too, at a Weird-Wild-West nerd larp where we 

We take ourselves v seriously.
If you want to take yourself
seriously too, check out
Calamity.

all play make-believe together in period costumes out in the woods with no air conditioning plus there are nerf-gun fights.  It’s dope.  But also exhausting, so chances of me applying my devilsome whit to relate anecdotes of my week are low.  So this is more of a tide-you-over post, by which I mean tide-ME-over, because I am sure you are just fine happily living your life.  Because it’s fall! 

So gross.

One of the things I noticed at Space Camp, that you may have also noticed recently at, say, Kroger, when considering your Oreo options, is that we are def at the beginning of fall.  No, Space Camp was not set up like Fright Night at Six Flags (although—if they did that???? I would be SO THERE???  RIGHT?!?!??!) but you could see it in the drive through the rural countryside, and in the trees.  Not like the leaves were all glorious and golden, just…you could tell.  Plus there was a morning where you could just kinda feel it.  I mean, technically it’s not fall til Sept 22, but let's not be *that guy* about it.

So AWESOME!

I love fall, because of all the normal and obvious reasons.  Sweaters, morning coffee in the crisp air, the onset of the best holidays (fight me, President’s Day), Winesap apples.  

A turn in the basic theme of this post, because this story is worth it:

My mom and I usually drive to the apple-picking mountains to get our bushel of Winesaps, which have a harvest season of about 26 seconds so you sometimes have to mess your week up to get it right.  And like, it’s a four hour drive round trip and we don’t do anything but stop, buy apples, and get back in the car to come home.  

Things my mom does not want to do: visit a pumpkin patch, build a scarecrow, get lost in a corn maze.  Mom doesn’t care.  She’s seen corn before and she’s wearing heels.  But we do get to spend quality time together on the road just hanging out.

Quote from last year: “What do you know about Credence Clearwater Revival?  NOTHING.  This is my music.”  For any of you who don’t know my mother, please know the Dowager Countess is a character study based on her.  I mean, she was absolutely wearing high heels for this car ride into the countryside, and the idea of her knowing anything about CCR is jarring and intriguing.  You can learn a lot in a four hour car ride, it turns out.  And then you get the best apples ever.

Winesap Apples are next-level good.  Tart and juicy and crisp and perfect.  This is the variety that led man to paint the whole apple world with a blame brush for leading humanity into sin when we all know no one would have given a snake with a Red Delicious the time of day.

Haha j/k obvs the real culprit was women

But for real you have to look their harvest schedule up because it is scant.  I talked to my mom today, just to check in, and she tells me—she went to the mountains to get apples this weekend. 

WHAT, I say, you went without me?  And got the imponderable and enchanting Winesaps?  Wait, is this even their time yet?

When you feel this sad, you go get apples.

No, Reader, it is not.  My mother did not check the harvest schedule, she just got frustrated because her football team suffered an embarrassing loss and got in her car and headed north.  This makes sense, if you are my mother. 

After two hours, she gets to the place.  Not the usual place, she says with disdain dripping from her voice (Dowager Countess, Reader), “because you remember they had all those…children running around.”  My mother has opinions on rambunctious children, even when 1) it is utterly charming and appropriate to take your children to an apple orchard in the fall and 2) I have no memories of unruly children at all, they were 

Demons.

just normal children, we are not talking Lord of the Flies here, and 3) she was literally only around these tiny barbarians and their outrageously negligent parents long enough to grab her bag of apples, glance at the jams and jellies, and cash out. 

That bridge is now apparently burned and she goes to another place.  She walks in and can’t find the Winesaps.  Presumably because it is not the season, but that hasn't stopped any of this yet so-- let's just let it play out.  She sees a man in an orchard employee t shirt (who, she casually mentions when telling me this tale, is on the phone when she approaches him.  Is it an important conversation?  No one cares.)  She asks him if he works there.  Yes, he says.  

She says it like that.

“Well where are your Winesaps?!” 

“Um…well it’s a little early, isn’t it?” he says.  He asks her what she likes about the Winesaps and patiently proceeds to cut open a number of other apples that are tart and juicy and crisp and actually in season.  She says they’re…fine.  They’re ok.  She likes this one better than that one, but what she REALLY likes is WINESAPS.  

She looks at the guy.  

The guy looks at her.

She looks at him. 

He probably begins to get a strange feeling at this point, like a faint smell of hay, or like a subtle sense of vertigo.  She keeps looking.  

He says “….you…you want me to just go get you some Winesaps?”

“Oh!  Would you?”

Of course he would.  He would be happy to.  And does he, of course he does.  He goes off into the fields and climbs the Winesap trees or whatever, while she makes small talk in the air conditioning at a country orchard store with another employee.  That is how she discovers that this isn’t just an orchard guy, this is The Orchard Guy, his father started this place, he now owns it, and thankfully dad trained him up not just in farming but in southern hospitality in the face of my mother.

Just a side story about my mom, this is the woman who, when the city sent people to work on the power lines in the front yard when I was about 13, went and talked to them for a total of ten minutes and suddenly they’re taking their truck to pick up garden stones and chopping wood in the back yard.  

So Mr. Apple Orchard, he didn’t have a chance, but don’t feel bad for him.  I am absolutely certain that when she left he was happy to have helped her and believed that running into the fields for her was exactly what he wanted to do and hoped she would come back again next year.  She’s that good.

I feel like maybe all of this might not be painting the right picture of my mother.  She is amazing.  She is smart, and classy, and loyal, and wise.  But also very particular, a little peculiar, and her superhero power is force of personality.  She isn't being maliciously manipulative, she just...comes with her own gravity.  

Anyway, I’m apparently going to have to get my own Winesaps this year.  Which was a goal of mine, which takes us back to the original post about fall goals but that story was irresistible-- if you're still with me, Reader, bless you and I'll keep it brief.

In the theme of other seasonal goals, here is my fall bucket list:

     1.  Make a pumpkin pie out of a pumpkin.  I don’t particularly like pumpkin pie, but I *do* have a fondness for overwrought projects. 

     2.  Go to the state fair.  Sub goals: eat funnel cake, meet a teacup pig, and hit something with a baseball for which I win a prize (jail time does not count, but would make for a great post).

     3.  Make homemade Halloween decorations that I will never use again because I do this every year and, in practice, I’m not actually very good at it.  In the moment I am always very proud of them, and with the clarity of time I realize they’re very disappointing, and next year I always decide to start again (but still don’t throw the old ones away, I am not some godless heathen, I MADE that).  This Sisyphean cycle is one of my favorite or at least longest-lasting fall traditions.

     4.  Go camping in the mountains and make everyone listen to the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack the whole time because that is the essence of the mountains and it makes it better.

     5.  Meet Shinsuke Nakamora.  This isn’t a fall thing in particular, I just love him so it goes on all bucket lists. 

He brought the violin to the WWE.  I dare you not to love him.

Out of my frustrated searchings, one year I made
this useful purchase, and by "this" I mean I have
twelve of them.  I used them once at Passover.
Once.
I have no regrets.

     6.  Find and purchase the elusive and perfect turkey-shaped soup tureen that I have been looking for for yeeeeears now.  I want him ril bad.  He is too big, tasteful [sic], ceramic, and does not cost sooo many of the dollars.  I have yet to find this glorious creature, but I believe he is out there, and I don’t care that we have neither space nor use for him.  

 

     7.  Figure out what to do with the lemon trees I absolutely bought knowing they can’t survive a frost, the monsters will just eat them if they come inside, and they can’t just go in the garage to sleep all winter because that’s not the kind of plant they are. 

     8.  Plant winter things, like collards and brussel sprouts, even though I know good and well I will neither harvest nor eat them.

They do it.  So why can't I do it?

 9.  Grow my own bacteria.  What’s that you say, Reader?  Bacteria is always growing, just all by itself, because it’s prolific in the world?  Well, you’re right.  But I want to science up some of my own fancy bacteria.  There are bacteria that eat ammonia/sweat smells and poop out nothing-that-smells-or-hurts-you and I just don’t know why I can’t make my own to grow in, say, my boxing gloves.  And kitty litter box.  And armpits.  Basically everywhere.  I have no idea how to do this.  I do have the internet, however, and if I create a monster, I’m sure you’ll hear about it.

     10.  Vote so hard in the midterms.  So.  Hard.

We’re like...halfway through September.  Dragon Con has come and gone, school busses are messing up my commute, and the sun sets earlier and earlier.  I wish you a wonderful fall.  May it bring you cozy fires, crunchy leaves, good apples, and harmony with the universe.

 

So hard.