Eww, It�s All Sticky

On occasion something beautiful sticks out of daily life that you just have to notice.

           It was just last week that I re-experienced the art of making home-grown apple cider.  The first time I pressed apples was part of a Boy Scout fundraiser at the tender age of six back home on Orcas Island.  We would line up our four big apple presses on the side of the Island Market parking lot, and back in a huge flatbed truck overloaded with crates of local produce.  We would wash, grind, press, decant, and sell all of the cider in one afternoon and then go home with a jug in each hand and a smile on our faces.  Of course, the way I remember it, it was warm, sunny, and nothing ever went wrong.     This time was a little different…

Everything seemed cursed straight from the get-go.  The apple press wasn’t quite as big as I remembered, the apple cider didn’t seem to smell as good, and it was raining frozen cats and dogs the whole time.  Frankly, the experience was nigh miserable.  First, we got up early in the morning, which to me is currently a foreign concept and caused a nasty conflict with my sleep routine.  Aside from that, it was cold; and that made the two layers of fluffy green down blankets strewn tightly around my body seem all the more endearing.  Of course, with a little help from some overtly loud “good vibrations” played through my auditory-insulating pillow by that dear brother of mine, I was up and walking blindly into things in no time.  The morning I met outside was grey and slippery, leaving the little uneven cement path leading down the hill from our house to my grandma’s front lawn more treacherous than ever.  I took the safer route - the grass next to the path - and promptly slipped and fell upon my poor skinny arse.  It didn’t help that a dozen people I didn’t know were already at the press helping out when I made my glorious entrance, leaving me completely obvious to the naked or even well-covered eye.  What a figure I was, splayed out on the green luscious grass with my bright yellow plastic overalls glaring out from underneath a painfully orange-red flannel coat, leaving only a fraction of my face showing out from the dry protection of my royal blue sweatshirt hood and neon orange wool hunting cap.  The first thing I was compared to was a wet clown, as opposed to a dry clown or a generally horizontal ground-clown (rarely seen in the northwest but not unheard of).  Luckily, I was able to save face because I knew the apple-pressing routine so well: stand there and look busy.  I promptly grabbed the tamping paddle and declared the job of grinding the apples mine!  No more than a second later I was back to my old ways of dropping apples into the feed chute to watch them get shred into little chunks by the jagged metal lumps poking out from the rotating cylinder housed into the wooden frame of the press.

            The apple press is a simple contraption: it is a four to five foot tall “cart” with insufficient wheels and one very cheap motor.  The apples go into a chute at the top of the “cart,” through the motorized grinding wheel, and fall out into a two foot-tall vertically-oriented wooden cylinder on the flat bottom of the “cart.”  The cylinder, when full of mangled apples, is slid out from the grinder and under the press.  The press on this cart is a large wooden disk that fits into the cylindrical apple-chunk holder and squeezes the very essence from the apples out through the cylinder’s slitted sides into a tasty-beverage holder.  This disk is extended down from a wheel at the top of the “cart,” that only through tremendous effort and grunting can be turned, thus lowering the disk and squeezing the nectar from the fruits.  The whole apple press is at least 50 years old, weighs a ton, and is always sticky no matter how long you wash it.  However, ours is pretty clean because it’s been sitting in the rain for the last year (we live in the Pacific Northwest; its always raining here).

            Speaking of rain, the entire day kept true to the nature of the Northwest.  The rain was headed towards earth with a plan for world domination, constantly switching its tactics between gusts of minute spray that splatters all over you and the heavy mortar-like droplets that pick up speed entering the stratosphere only to nail you right in the face.  Of course, being boy scouts, we were prepared.  My brother and I had a huge tarp tied up above the press in no time.  We even stuck a 2x4 vertically under it in the middle so we had a “tent” to keep us dry… well, until the wind yanked the tarp skyward dropping the board, KAPLUNK, straight onto the unprotected skull of some obscure friend of my grandma.  Of course, being boy scouts, we were prepared… to sit there and watch everyone else help her while we kept pressing apples.  They weren’t going to mash the juice out of themselves; somebody had to do it.  So the larger “half” of the group helped the nice lady into the nice warm house to eat some nice hot soup while putting nice cold ice on her nice little bump, leaving but a few of us to regain control of the tarp and mention all the swear words in existence threefold times over.  Swears wont swear themselves; somebody had to do it.

            It was about this time that the situation became a little more like a sharp and very wet stick jammed in my ear than the happy, playful apple presses that I remembered so many summers ago.  I was about ready to call it quits and attend to my gurgling stomach’s needs when I noticed something amidst the madness, something that called to my attention not unlike a burning bush in a desert, something that was making a horrific racket.  Of course I am referring to the tamping paddle which got jammed in the grinder and was threatening to end the entire process (not that I would have minded).  After swatting off the machine, I not-so-carefully extracted the slightly mauled paddle with a short series of grunts and curses.  Looking up from the chipped mess, I happened to notice a “penny.” There was a toddlerish little girl standing under grandma’s willow tree in a yellow plastic raincoat and too-big matching boots, unnaturally holding a huge apple between her tiny hands. Gripping it from its ends with her fingers from both hands, she tentatively scraped a bite out of the top and chewed on it thoughtfully.  I had never seen such a look of concentration as the one that developed on her face; creating a little furl in her eyebrows, pouting her lips as she tried that apple, seemingly to judge its existence by that one bite.  I could have sworn it was the first time she ever ate an apple.  She even had her head in that upward angle of consideration, really posing the question of “apple?”  She looked down at the apple, took another awkward bite, and the moment ended, just like that.  But I saw a penny, I know it, and sticks in my memory to this day.

For the sake of illumination: by a “penny” I don’t mean a little disk of copper, I mean that single shiny moment that sticks out above the rest and makes your day. I am starting to see the world as Annie Dillard describes it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises.  The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.”  Truly, I have found that a penny will make itself obvious to you each day if you just take that second to notice it when it’s right in front of you, standing in the rain considering a simple apple with such intensity that the surrounding chaos just seems to melts away.

As if in a scene out of the Matrix, I stepped outside of my body and rotated around it in bullet-time, noticing all those little things, pennies really, that made that apple press everything I hoped it would be.  Maybe it was raining and everything seemed to go wrong, but that moment of tranquility was enough to keep me mashing apples for the next hour before I was allowed to stop and go eat lunch, I mean… it was enough to make the experience worth writing a five page paper about, I mean… It just made it all worth it.  In that moment of clarity, a penny made me rich, even if it was only for a single moment out of time, even if I stood in the rain for four hours mashing apples to get it….  Well, at least the cider was good.

Reviews

[A Shell]

it made perfect sense and a very nice read. I really liked the imagery ^^. however there were some places where the flow was a bit interupted, i think the only thing you need to do is rearrange some things to correct that. I'll send you my suggestions by email.
- xoxoxo