These Days, It's All About Apples And Pumpkins

What does it do to you to see apples floating in a bucket of water?  Does it make you a kid again?  In a place that just absolutely can't exist any more?  Somewhere like, oh I don't know...the past?  Back there where those very apples actually tasted like apples?  Back there where there were only two kinds of apples:  Orchard apples and Red Delicious Christmas stocking apples. Oh the lovely, lilting, bouyancy of the word itself.  Apple. (Somebody should definitely name their child "Apple.")

Hey, what?!  Like 40 or more varieties of apples?  In one grange hall?  The idea is to walk the perimeter, taste each and every one of them and take notes to return to your favorites.  I couldn't hang with those hard-core apple tasters, though.  After a few bites, I got a bit full of apples.

However, no matter how many samplings of apples I had, I just couldn't walk away from these dewey little drops of immortal ambrosia.  WICKSON CRAB APPLE.  At once tart, tangy, noisy, crispy-clear and sweet.  Like an apple stolen from the past.  Like an apple's apple with the flavor of a real apple!

Just ask this kid; he'll tell you.

So with all apple tales come stories of spiders and caterpillars and the ancient art of examination and discovery.

Another day, another tractor ride. And wagon ride and bounce walk. And kittens in the hay. Maybe a pumpkin or two.

WHO DOESN'T JUST ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS TIME OF YEAR?!

Another Day In The Cascades--Peshastin, WA

Really only down the road from Leavenworth right off the highway at a little place called Smallwoods Harvest, where they sell fruit and related miscellany, and have a handful of attractions for children.  I'll just make this a picture post.  (The horses were corralled behind the Wedge Mountain Inn motel where we stayed for half the price with about double the amenities as our stay at the Hilton in Vancouver, WA!  This place helped fasten the feeling of being on an old-fashioned road trip.)

One Day In The Cascades--Leavenworth, WA

I had been looking forward to our little trip to Leavenworth for more than a year!  German Christmas traditions seem to hold me in thrall more than any other, although if you put the word "Christmas" before any other word you're speaking, you definitely have my attention.  I thought we should try to get there during the holiday season, and we probably would have if recent circumstances hadn't drained the coffers as they did, so we went on a cheaper weekend just in time for the Washington State Autumn Leaf Festival, replete with real, "the way they should be" parade and attendant festivities.

The best part about this parade was how easy it was to watch!  No clamoring crowds with big ol' adults jockeying for a good position in front of the kids, no endless lines of sleeping bags and sweaters holding places on the sidewalk hours before the start time.  When was the last time you went to a real parade and had such a good spot to watch from as did this little fella with the sun-kissed noggin? There were a lot of people in town that day, but I think the parade route was long and winding enough for us all to spread out in the perfect weather and enjoy ourselves...not very far from our $5.00 parking spot, as well,

Did I say it was a real parade?  It was.  It was festive and colorful, interesting and moving and had a lot of marching bands and pony-drawn carts and royalty sitting on convertibles and carefully constructed floats.  I love a good parade and hadn't had an experience like this for a long time.

 Desmond thought he should have those horses.  After all, hadn't he just spent the morning at the corral out behind our motel making friends with them?  (more about that later)

The town was pretty much closed off for the festival, but after the parade was over, my interest waned a bit, except for getting to the nutcracker museum to further fuel my relish for all things nutcracker!

The weather was autumn-warm, the sun high enough to elicit a squint or two and some tiny beads of sweat on baby's nose as he eventually slept in the stroller.  In this little Bavarian Village with a big reputation, I bought Italian bacon, suausage and sauerkraut.  Katy found the bakery and a Sophisticated Hippie boutique, which did not reflect hippie ideals in their prices, so all she bought was a couple of pastries.

Then we left town to have supper at Big Y diner on the road to Cashmere.  Should have got two slices of that piled-high-meringued lemon meringue pie, of which the meringue was golden and delicate but the lemon filling was the real hidden gem!  

We Used To Be Camping, And Now We're Not

For most of the day today, I've been feeling as if life is divided by "camping" and "not camping;" more specifically, camping last night and not there anymore.  We had been talking about a little camping trip for a while, now.  It's like we were bracing ourselves against a dip and a dunk in glacier pools.  Katy and I have been "all your life" campers, not ones to shy away from very many types of roughing it.  Of course, I appreciate and enjoy the so-called creature comforts such as hot baths and clean sheets and all I need in order to whip up a quick and satisfying supper in less that 17 minutes.  I am also quite keen on pitching a tent, unplugging and sleeping under towering, swaying tree tops, largely, these days, in behalf of all the woodsmoke-filled memories occupying jealously protected areas of my heart and mind.  

I've camped in deserts, high mountains, flatlands, on the beach, against rocky outcroppings, along side creeks and rivers and ravines, in trenches and even unexpectedly in strangers living rooms.  I've been shelterd under ice and snow ceilings, canvas, nylon, newspaper, stalactites, polyester, roped-together pine bows and nothing but moon and stars.  (How do you pluralize the word, "lean-to?") I've foraged Euell Gibbons-style for sustenance and gone prepared with a bag of fast food fries and sauce, have cooked over open fires, small stoves, under rocks and in earth pits.

In addition to having shared my campsite with peers, elders, pros and novices, alike, friends, family, pets, bees and other insects, snakes, wanderers, and various rodent types, I have been surprised in the middle of an eerily black and quiet night by a moose sniffing around my sleeping bag.

And yet, here we were, for at least two days, nervously anticipating and gearing up for a one-night camping trip with our whirling-dervish toddler, as though we weren't the seasoned experts I know us both to be.

He bested us.

 I snapped this picture mid-air as he was mistaking our tent and air mattress for a bounce house!  He was thrilled and unpinnable.

We had entered the tent a few hours after nightfall, with the naive hope that he was worn out from a busy afternoon at a beach birthday party and a couple of nature walks around the campground enough to maybe go to sleep after a few moments in the dark.  Can you guess we underestimated the power of a first camping experience?  That power that somehow gets injected into your very being.  This was happening to our boy.

We had walked in the sparse moonlight, with and without the aid of flashlights, and he was just delighted with the whole experience; excited, chatty and happy to climb over or squeeze through, jump off and scramble around.  The only time he actually settled down for any length of time was when we waited for his mother outside the restroom and he found some rocks.  Rocks.  Again.  This funny little boy and his adventures with rocks.  

I have no idea what time it was when he finally wound down and fell asleep because I fell asleep while he was still crawling over me and over his mother and kissing us over and over and crawling back again how many times! (This was like reliving Katy's first camping trip when she was about a year old.  My sister and her 4 year old were with us in one tent, where Katy made the same kind of rounds delightedly crawling over us back and forth, seemingly unable to contain herself.)

Shortly after emerging from the tent, we took one more walk-about, broke camp and came home for breakfast and naps all around.  We've been experiencing a sort of surreal re-entry period today; certainly, Desmond's energy and activity having a lot to do with that.  But I think it might be more about what a great experience it was for him, because let's face it, CAMPING!  and we can't help but feel at least a bit of it empathically.  (In a very good way.)

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