09.10.2007 - 2:19 p.m.

At my parents� house, in the fall, there is always a brown bag of apples on the floor in the kitchen. They are small apples, spotted and somewhat worm-eaten, from the six trees in the side yard. There are a lot of them.

At my parents� house, in the fall, the kitchen is the center of the house. It�s where everyone comes as they return from their errands or finish their chores or come up from their new home down south, and where everyone sits discussing their days or their plans or this neat article they read somewhere. While they do, without even being asked, they fish an apple out of the bag, peel it, trim the brown pieces off, and slice the rest into a giant ceramic bowl already seeded with cinnamon and brown sugar.

It is an ongoing, neverending project. The knives rotate, and every so often, someone bundles the newspaper around the pile of shavings and cores and lays out a new one, and every few mornings, my mother (or a deputized other) will bake something, to empty out that bowl. Earlier this weekend, that was me, making apple crumble. This morning I had leftover pie for breakfast. When everyone tires of desserts, there will be a giant batch of muffins, half of which will be frozen to eat over the course of the winter. Some years there is apple butter.

At the earliest hint of spring, the trees are pruned, by my father on the ladder, my mother from the ground, myself and some subset of siblings with our butts set in the crook of the trunk and a limb; the leavings are gathered into sweet-smelling faggots, some of which will scent the fireplace a winter or two in the future.

Later in the spring, the trees bloom, and it all starts over again.

And all that wasn�t what I was thinking of, this weekend at the renaissance fair, looking at the wooden Celtic knots that were somebody�s wares. Deep thoughts aren�t really accessible when it is that hot and the beer in your mug is that gone.

But I liked the way that, depending how you looked at them, the knots felt either tied, or carved, or grown that way. I especially liked that however they curved, however they tangled, the end was the middle was the beginning again.

-stonebridge

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