How d'ya like them apples? A lot, actually
(or, If An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away, Four Apples A Day Keep... Three Doctors Away?)

I was playing video games on the computer yesterday morning when I got a call from one of my classmates. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Playing video games on my computer," I sheepishly admitted.

"Well then, you have no excuse," she said, "you have to come with us to Walden Pond and then apple picking. We're leaving in 20 minutes."

The funny thing was that Nina and I had planned to go to Walden Pond that day, but gave up because of the lack of public transportation there. So after negotiating for her participation too, a big group of 9 us set out.

Walden Pond, which is much, much too big to be called a pond -- it'd be like calling the Rockies "the Rocky Hills" -- was beautiful. We ate lunch by the water and walked around, and checked out the site where Thoreau did his Transcendental thing for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days. The running joke among us was that he went home every Friday night for pizza at his parents' house, located a few miles away. It's apocryphal, yes, but he actually did walk the 1.5 miles into town every few weeks for supplies and, one would hope, a proper bath. There was a replica of his house, a one-room building 10 by 15 feet, which he built with supplies costing $30 (not adjusted for inflation, obviously). What with the twin bed, the desk and the chair, it looked almost like a dorm room, really. Except bigger than my dorm room (8X12 feet).

All kidding aside, there was a wooden placard near the site of the actual house (marked by stone posts now), inscribed with the famous quote from _Walden_, and when I read it, I actually felt the chills.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

After Walden Pond, we headed to Berlin Orchard, where yes, I ate four apples, but I really couldn't help it -- they're very seductive, the blushing pinks and reds of the Galas, the deep plum-like dark reds of the Empires, the shocking white meat of the Cortlands, the crispity, crunchity goodness of them all. And the day didn't help either; it was a cool fall day but warm in the sun, and at the top of the rows of apple trees, you could look down across the county, covered with trees going dormant for the year in the least dormant way possible: violent reds, oranges, and yellows between areas of valiantly still-green foliage.

Apple-picking. When I think of all the years I missed out on it, growing up in California -- which for some reason can do every other fruit well except apples -- I'm almost persuaded to say that yes, the East Coast is superior. There's just no experience that can hold up to apple-picking in the fall -- it makes you fall in love with the world, with the season, with the fruit. Speaking of which -- did I mention I ate three again today? This, after yesterday, when I ate:
- four apples down to the core
- apple crisp (with vanilla ice cream on top)
- a cup of apple cider
- half a cider donut

Oog. Slightly sick. But also yum. If that makes sense.