Good Morning!
Two apple stories .....
My dad’s college roommate & his wife used to visit during the fall for the Tobacco Festival football game. This was back before smoking was totally demonized, as you can tell by the name. Anyway, ‘Chick’ had a nursery and orchard and he would bring us a bushel basket each of Golden and Red Delicious apples. He personally picked them out of the harvest for us so they were ‘perfect’ and very large. We kept them in our basement (full basement) where it was cool. These apples were fresh off the trees, had never been in cold storage or laying around in a grocery store. We kids could not wait to get home and have an apple or two. From the top of the stairs, you could already SMELL them ... delicious before the first bite!. When you did actually eat them, they were oh-so-juicy, sweet and ‘crisp’ and the flavor was wonderful ... I have never had apples as good since.
When I was doing a lot of hiking in the mountains, there was one particular road coming out of the mountains where, near the bottom, there were apple stands where the ‘locals’ were selling some of their crop. These apples were also ‘fresh’ ... never in cold storage, etc. The two apples that I remember them selling are Rome & McIntosh. Probably some Granny Smith & Winesap were in the mix as well. I don’t recall the Red & Golden Delicious, but they were probably also at some of the stands. We would stop at a stand or two that looked interesting along the road and usually ended up with a couple of small brown paper bags with various apples varieties.
Mom and I were ‘talking apples’ yesterday & she was also remembering Chick’s fantastic apples. She wants to go to an orchard and pick some now, but there are no pick-your-own orchards near us - the closest are at least an hour & a half away so that’s a ‘no go’ for the folks, unfortunately. Two of my nieces live in ‘orchard territory’ so one of these years in the future, maybe I can tag along with them. :-)