First Friday blog of the year!
I'm exhausted, but I SHANT leave you without an entry tonight. You know you're tired when going to bed at 8:30 on a school night sounds like a fantastic idea.
Pretty normal day at school. English is still killing me, though. It's gotten so bad that it's starting to effect y other classes. I can't handle that. Switching out is sounding like a better idea each and every day.
But we're not going to talk about English. We're going to talk about apples.
In celebration of the beginning of October, I'm going apple picking tomorrow. (It's not just because it's the first of October. It just happened to be the first weekend that was free...) My family has an apple orchard. And a vineyard. Neither are particularly big, but they're enough to make a small amount of money. But I guess that's not really important.
But what is important is that this is something I do with my dad and my grandma and a few of my aunts and uncles every year. Or at least we try to do every year. We make the three-hour drive over to the orchards, pick for about two hours, then come back home. We really try (or at least my dad does) to do this and involve as many people as possible since my family doesn't really get the chance to be all together all of the time throughout the year. We only manage two or three times at the very least when we actually have everyone together. This is kind of one of those times. We stop at the usual restaurants at the usual times (a bakery in the morning to get breakfast/lunch and cookies and a small butcher shop where they sell yard-long sticks of house-made pepperoni; one of the hydroelectric dams along the river just outside the orchard; a small, family-run diner for a hot dinner after spending the day being whipped by the wind out in the field). I'm driving over with my grandma and one of my aunts, who will surely keep me entertained while I'm not either sleeping or doing homework. I almost always seem to have homework to do on these trips as well. One year, I had to read The Odyssey during the drive.
Sadly, it may be my last time making this trip, at least for another year, since I'll be at school by this time next year and be unable to get away like I can now. My dad'll still do this every year for as long as he can, as will my grandma...but I don't know when my next time will be.
I guess another thing that I have to think about is who will take care of this place, this place that is, literally, as old as I am (the first trees were planted right around the time I was born)...I know my dad won't be around forever, and this orchard is kind of his baby. His other baby. He's a teacher, but in reality he's a farmer at heart. I wonder if he expects me to uphold this piece of land, to take responsibility for it when he can't do it anymore.
Don't get me wrong. This is the twenty-first century. We don't have to till the land ourselves anymore or water it by hand, or even spend weeks and weeks harvesting it. We have machines and other people to do that for us. But there's still the "overseeing" of the land that still remains, even in this time where machine has replaced man in many aspects of life...It's not something I can see myself faithfully doing in thirty years...but I don't want my dad's (and my grandfather's, actually) dream to go to waste.
This weekend just turned into a bigger deal than I thought it would be. I just wanna go pick apples.
No comments:
Post a Comment