by J. Michael Wheeler
While L.A. has many food trends and fads and flash-in-the-pan food movements, it doesn’t have what one would call food traditions. It certainly doesn’t have seasonal food traditions (excluding the candy season of Halloween) because it doesn’t really have seasons. I was born and raised there, and until I moved to Boston, I didn’t know from strawberry-season, or maple syrup-season, or apple-picking-season. In L.A., it seemed there was always corn or strawberries or apples. And they always tasted the same. Kind of “what’s the big deal?” flavored.
New England, on the other hand, has seasons. Like those short couple of weeks in the spring when you can get fiddlehead ferns. I cook them up like asparagus and they are a real treat. Blackberries and strawberries are here and gone. We have wild raspberry bushes right in our yard: each summer they explode with fruit and there is nothing better than munching on a handful of sun-warmed berries. Except picking a bucketful and making a pie. Off the coast of Maine, for only a few months of the year, are caught the most delicious, small, sweet shrimp. And of course the fall brings Apple Picking Season.
While I didn’t spend my childhood here in New England, I am the single-father of a five-(and three-quarters, he’ll tell you) year-old son and together we are discovering and making our seasonal traditions. And Apple Picking is one of them.
On Columbus Day we headed up to Russell Orchards (russellorchardsma.com) in Ipswich Massachusetts with some friends. It was a perfect fall day. When we got to the farm we wandered over to the hay wagon. We climbed on and were tractored out to the orchards where we were handed an orchard map (the Fuji’s are on that row, and the Empires there) and a bag and we picked and tasted and walked down the rows of the short green-leafed orchard trees heavy with grape-like clusters of apples. The apples were colored apple-red (really), and apple-green (really) and some were speckled with both colors. The short trees framed a deep blue fall sky with white clouds and grey clouds sprinkled like the patterns on the apples we were picking.
We filled our bag and walked back down the rows of apple trees. We headed into the General Store for the next part of our apple picking tradition: freshly made, very hot (and greasy, but oh-so-good) apple cider doughnuts.
Full of apples and doughnuts we headed home. The crisp day was fading and apple-picking season was coming to an end and it was fall (we’d already said goodbye to the summer). The leaves on the maple trees were beginning to turn their fall colors, and the still green fields and lawns were flecked with reds and golds and browns.
My son’s birthday is at the end of October and soon he will turn six years old. And then seven. And then eight years old. And the seasons pass by so fast, don’t they? And maybe that’s what tradition is all about: grabbing a piece of time: the cycles repeat themselves: those delicious shrimp will be back; the fiddleheads will make their brief appearance. And next year, next fall, I will take my son apple picking again.
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