You Can't Be Feeling All Those Things At Once...

Carolyn and I made apple cobbler yesterday.

Well, Carolyn's involvement was to take every, single peeled apple, take a couple of bites out of it, look at me, say, "MMmmmmmm!", and then drop it back in the bowl.

She seemed to like the Granny Smith's the most.

Which is confusing to me.

Because those things are tart.

I love to peel apples.

It's like a contest with myself to see if I can take the peel off in one, big ring.

(Have I ever mentioned that I'm the daughter of a former potato-peeling contest winner?)

And the smell just screams fall to me.

It makes me ache for home.

And miss my mom and dad.

And my sisters.

Every fall for as long as I can remember, we drove down to grandma's house to pick apples.

Dad brought the tractor so we could reach the very top branches on the loader.

Not that I ever climbed up on that loader because as luck would have it, I was born a scardy cat.

That was Nancy's job.

We picked boxes and boxes of apples.

When we got home, it was a race for mom's very best peeler.

I'm not going to lie, one year, before we ever picked the apples, I hid the best peeler so no one else could have it.

Mom would spread out an old table cloth, and we'd sit on it, peeling apple after apple.

Even the ones that were no bigger than an egg.

We'd peel until we had black marks on our hands.

Then, mom would make gallons of apple sauce on the stove in her giant silver pot.

And apple pie in the oven.

The whole house smelled like apples, sugar, and cinnamon.

For breakfast the next morning, we got to have pie with thick cream on it, straight from the cow.

That was the only time we could have dessert for breakfast without mom saying, "That's like having a beer for breakfast."

Guess what I had for breakfast this morning?!

Apple cobbler straight from the pan.

It was heaven.