After Apple Picking

The fall season, apples, and the beginning of school all go hand in hand. I remember back when I was a young kid actually looking forward to the first day of school to start, realizing only around middle school that I didn't enjoy school and did not want to go. These days, I'm back to looking forward to the first days of school to begin, but find that there is an added amount of pressure and stress now that I'm approaching things from the other side of the desk. In order to alleviate that stress, I look towards other fall activities to take my mind off of school.

This past weekend I went to pick drops in an apple orchard that members of my family own. For the uninitiated, picking drops is exactly as it sounds: You pick up apples that have dropped on the ground. These are used for cider and other sorts of things. The first time I picked drops was last year with my wife, and it proved to be difficult work. I was incredibly sore after each day and vowed that I would not go back again. Yet, after all of the pain and time spent working last fall, I decided that it would be a great idea to return to the orchard this year.

My wife was unavailable to work with me this time around, so my brother and I went out to the apple orchard and picked drops. The entire time I was picking drops, I didn't have a lot to think about, but the Robert Frost poem “After Apple Picking,” kept coming to mind. Not that I'm a huge fan of poetry, or this poem in particular, and I could only think of a few lines, but I thought about how I taught it every year. For some reason, this poem stick with me. I'm not sure if it's because I have experience (little experience) in an apple orchard, or just because a lot of students like it, but either way it has stayed with me. I kept thinking, while picking drops, about how clever it would be to name a blog post after that, though it would have little to do with the actual poem.

In the end, this is the blog post that I thought of. It certainly isn't much, and not nearly as clever as I was hoping, but it does show that we're always making connections to literature and art. Even minor ones.