A ~ Apples

    Coming home from school and seeing that the fall delivery of apples had come in that day was always exciting.
     We were allowed to try the different kinds, but then bushels and bushels of crisp Yellow Delicious apples were stored in the darker part of the basement where they would remain until spring.
     Mom would have several different kinds of apples to make applesauce. A mix of Granny Smith and Golden Delicious were turned into hundreds of quarts of sauce that filled a whole section of our canning shelves. Cortland and McIntosh made a lovely pink sauce. I wasn't the biggest fan of applesauce, but a lovely shade of pink made it much more appealing to me.
     Big roast pans filled with peeled apples were placed in the oven where they baked at a low heat for hours and were turned into apple butter.
     My favorite were the Yellow Delicious. Night after night we would head down to the basement to fill a bowl of apples. Mom would peel and slice them, and then we'd munch on them as she read a chapter or two from a book for our bedtimes stories.
     By spring the apples were beginning to get a little wrinkled and weren't as crisp and juicy, but we kept enjoying them until the last one was gone, and time for gardening had arrived once more.
    Spring and summer were great, but I always looked forward to fall and winter. The season of apples and bedtime stories.