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Oct. 1, 2006

Tree of knowledge

By Michelle Martin

You can pick two pecks of apples in less time than it takes to pick a pound of raspberries.

Hay is scratchy against bare legs, and it gets in your shoes and stays there.

No chain doughnut store can come close to a fresh from the stove apple doughnut, or a slice of hot apple pie made within feet of where the apples grew.

And no matter how scary they might look, bees and spiders really aren’t out to get you.

Those were among the lessons learned this year on an annual family apple-picking expedition, this one to a new orchard that had pick-them-yourself late raspberries to offer, along with early MacIntoshes, hay rides, a hay maze and a few calm animals to pet.

The autumn ritual—this year shared with young cousins and a school friend and her family—offers a chance for us to spend an afternoon outdoors together as a family, usually at a place where the kids can run loose among the trees and lead us to where they have found the best fruit.

It also helps connect our city kids with the world of agriculture, reminding them that food comes from farms, for the most part, and does not appear, fully formed and wrapped in plastic, at the supermarket by magic. It has to grow, and be harvested, and be trucked to wherever it will be sold—and that’s only the most natural, unprocessed food.

No matter how much technology has influenced the process, the basics haven’t changed: at the orchard we went to, some of the varieties they expected to be ready were not yet ripe after a week straight of rain.

Of course, children whose religion classes have recently been talking about the creation stories in Genesis can’t spend the day at an apple orchard without bringing Adam and Eve into it, no matter how much we point out that the Bible never said it was an apple that caused all the trouble.

It wasn’t really the fruit at all, so much as the disobedience, which took the sweetness of the fruit and turned it sour. Disobedience to God is a serious business, we explain, and, self-serving parents that we are, remind them that the Ten Commandments tell them to honor their father and mother.

But God’s greatest commandment was to love, to love God and one another as God loved us. And that love is manifested in the goodness of his creation: the warmth of the sun on an autumn afternoon, the sweetness of apples and berries, the sound of insects buzzing and donkeys braying and children laughing.

Only a good God—one who loves us—could have made an afternoon ripe for the picking like that

Times like that help us to love one another, and hold on to that love when the weather turns dark and the world looks scary. Times like that give us confidence that when things look bleak, the sun will come out again.

Martin is a Catholic New World staff writer. She can be reached at [email protected].