“And all at once Summer collapsed into Fall.”

Oscar Wilde

I am ready for…fall leaves, cooler nights, pumpkin patches…heck, pumpkin beer and most of all apple picking. When I was little, my parents would take my brother and I to an apple orchard in East Lyme, Connecticut. We would cruise along on the Merritt Parkway bopping along to my parent’s favorite 50’s music station watching the colors of the trees change the more north we drove. I remember arriving to the orchard with the smell of apple cider donuts wafting in the air and the promise of apple cider at the end of our apple picking. Annually, I would gorge myself on fresh picked apples. I loved to pluck a little red and golden yellow Cortland or Gala gem off the tree branch and bite into the crisp skin and discover juicy fall in that apple. A full bag of fresh picked apples promised to become an apple pie that my dad would later bake….his only claim to fame in the kitchen. He would bake a juicy apple pie and slice up cheddar cheese to place on top after it came out of the oven wafting the cinnamon and apple aroma throughout our home.