A long time ago in a September far, far away, we decided to go apple picking.

I remember it in crisp detail. We got in the car and rolled up the driveway, crushing a few green crabapples in the dirt. Along Route 220 to the orchards in Thorndike, the sun was warm and gold-colored, not only by poetic fantasies of autumn, but in actuality. I remember humming past fields of cow corn. Of hayrolls shrinking into the gauzy distance.

In the maples and oaks, blazes of red and orange already breaking out. Some Septembers, it’s impossible to imagine anywhere else on Earth with weatherscape more beautiful than central Maine’s. May no fate willfully misunderstand me — that’s all dissolved by January. But in late September, the world balances on a dream of the divine. An autumn day is like a thousand years.

At the orchard, we parked in the gravel driveway, beside row on row of apple trees. My wife, Bonnie, her hair then long and golden, and son, Jack, then-12 and pugnaciously wearing a Yankees cap, and I made a beeline for the farm store, fixed up neatly in a shed beside a barn. We chatted with the orchard keeper, then collected up some brown paper bags to store the work. A mutt-faced chow chained near the door watched us like a guardian lion as we walked across the grass to the trees.

Trees flush and heavy with apples. Ten thousand fruit to touch, cherish in hand and not let fall. All we could use would fit in a couple of bags, though. They grow in russet clusters so much like blossoms they’re heartwarming. So many that when Jack reached out — “Wow, look at that big red one!” — the snap knocked two more onto the grass. Off to the cider apple heap with those, we thought.

In minutes, the first bag was nearly full of round red McIntoshes. Rows of trees remained, diminishing into the distance like a lesson in perspective for painting students. Or like Septembers retreating into the past.

“Let’s get another kind,” Jack said, and Bonnie pointed out we’d learned the Cortlands were ripe, too.

We ducked between two heavy-laden trees, crossed tractor wheel ruts between rows, brushed under a Golden Delicious tree whose pomes were not yet ripe and emerged among the Cortlands. There was almost a twinge of guilt, I remember, about McIntosh roads not taken. So many apples left unpicked.

Behind us we heard a tiny voice say, “I’m helping too!” We looked back along the more traveled path to see a miniature person with a silver-sparkled lavender jacket reach for the lowest-hanging branch and pluck an apple bigger than her hand. But grasping it tight, with a half-eaten Mac in the other, she scurried to the cart her mom was pulling and tossed it in.

Katie was her name. Her smile was like a candle glow in her first walking autumn. I imagine the September sun and apple-smelling air were like a visionary experience to her. She darted back to the tree and tugged at another half-green Cortland.

We picked and piled apples in our second bag, tucked more Cortlands on top of Macs. Our arms began to ache with the weight, and Jack discovered the hard way the dynamic limitations of brown paper and finger strength.

They say firewood warms you twice, once when you cut it and again when you burn it. But apples warm you at least three times — once when you see them ripening in the orchard, again when you pick them and a third time when you eat them.

After apple picking comes the delirium of ways your mom or gold-haired wife prepared them. Whole fruits shiny and tangy. Sliced in steaming pies, pastries, cakes, cobblers, crisps and crumbles. In muffins, custards, dumplings, puddings, pancakes, puffs and strudels. Apple tarts and turnovers, fritters, salads, even soups. Baked, sauced, cidered, fried, jellied, candied, chutneyed. With cheese or ice cream, honey or cinnamon, nutmeg and clove. I can’t remember the rest.
Maybe we needed more than two bags. Bonnie had all the recipes.

We hefted the overflowing loads and headed back to the farm store, where the orchard keeper advised us not to make pies with McIntoshes because they get too mushy. Better for applesauce. For pies, use Northern Spies or Cortlands because the pieces hold their shape in the oven heat. Also good and outlasting even frost will be Empires, Honeycrisps, Delicious (red and golden) and Macouns.

Inside the store, we spotted more signs of the season’s mellow fruitfulness — row on row of jars. Strawberry, raspberry, blueberry jam and jelly, pickles, honey, maple syrup, dilly beans and salsa. All made on the farm. From a gaggle of orange faces on the floor, we selected two small, perfectly shaped pumpkins for the kitchen table. Bonnie spotted a vase of giant yellow sunflowers. The orchard keeper cheerfully handed over four autumn beauties. The guard chow by his silence appeared to approve.

While we settled up the account, lavender-clad Katie came rubbing her eyes, along with her mom and their cartful of apples.

Now, two decades later, Katie no doubt remembers not a single bit of this. Time has flooded the details. But there’s also no doubt that the golden sunlight, the golden apples in the sun, the cartload of apples she helped fill, are all still living in her love of autumn and her mom. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.” I think of Katie remembering nothing and everything about that day, in the long redreaming of her apple picking sleep, whatever sleep it is.

Something gold can stay, and does.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at dwilde.naturalist@gmail.com. His book “Summer to Fall: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.

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