A to Z "A"

My miscellaneous theme will be mostly recollections of my childhood in the country.  And yeah, I finally committed to A to Z with only hours left to go until the linky list closes.

A is for, among other things, apple. I think few things are more country than apples, apple butter, apple sauce, apple pie.  I think of my grandma's apple orchards. She was mighty proud of them. And when I think of grandma and her apples, I picture her handing me a small pot and telling me to go down to the springhouse and fetch some apples for her.  Then she'd sit and peel them, mellow and mushy as they always were-- much past fall picking and storing.

The seventh of eight children, I was born into a world of stark contrasts.  Living on a century farm in a home with  gravity-flow cold spring water, an outhouse for a bathroom, we learned to live by our hands. The garden provided, we had chickens, milk cows, and most of what we needed.  It was all simply part of life.

Back to grandma's apple orchard.  Even while I reached to pick apples, carefully choosing where I placed my bare feet to avoid marauding yellow-jackets, I could look  through the apple tree branches at the heavens so newly touched by man. It was hard to believe that a man--an "astronaut"  had gone up there in a rocket.

AM radios gave us the news, and we listened. I recall my grandma lamenting about the atomic bomb that would fall from the sky and kill us all. Yep--she said it just like that! I laugh now, but I was scared back then.

Never mind. We had asparagus in the garden, apples and apricots in the orchard.  Angels were real.  and it was an amazing time.

We were clinging to the time and place--holding fast we thought.  We didn't see how the future was grabbing us and tearing us away from a simple time, a naive world, and ripping us forward into decades of technological changes.