VISIT MINNESOTA MONTHLY ON THE WEB

Online Article Index

EVERY GOLDEN AUTUMN, my family gathered to make apple cider. My grandparents' yard had eight apple trees. Every year we shook the labors of those trees to the ground. And we made of them a drink concentrated with memories.

My grandmother's house was a five-hour trek by car. Her cookie jar was stocked with her secret recipe, which I learned was on the back of the Nestlé package, when I was old enough that such knowledge didn't hurt. There was a fresh jar of apple cider in the fridge for every visit. When the cider ran out, I made a dash down into the dark basement for more. The cookies, thank God, never ran out.

The following morning, my aunt, uncle, and neighbors arrived to help. Baskets and buckets came down from the garage rafters. Two-gallon glass jugs, covered with dust and cobwebs, were brought from the basement and lined up on the kitchen counter to be washed. Every paring knife was snatched up. There was a prolonged search for cheesecloth, always misplaced.

My brother and I climbed high into the heavy, fruit-laden branches and shook them. Apples fell like a thunderclap. It was a thrill to rain apples. Below us, my mother and Nana gathered the apples into bushel baskets. Soon, whole wheelbarrows of apples waited where my father set up the cider press‹dragged from the corner of the garage and cleaned with a garden hose. Our press wasn't really built for apples, but for grapes. It was a wide trough with a hand-cranked mill on one end, and a press, like a giant screw, on the other. Underneath was a slatted bucket with no bottom. The mill ground the apples into a slushy pulp. We slid the filled bucket down the trough, capped it with a thick wooden lid, and screwed the press down on it. Juice flowed through the slats, down the trough, and into a waiting dishpan. When the pan filled, we strained it through cheesecloth into an earthenware crock.

Our mill was too small to grind whole apples, so we had to quarter them with paring knives. The family gathered, three generations around a metal tub filled with freezing water and bobbing apples, to wash and slice the fruit and swap stories. My mother asked Nana if the old store was still there, if Papa's garage still stood by the railroad tracks. Someone recalled how Papa threw firecrackers out of his mail truck to scare away dogs in pursuit. Sometimes a knife slipped and someone brought their bleeding hand to their mouth, nursing it like a snake bite.

Beside me, my uncle mumbled, "This life is short." I was surprised; he didn't fixate on such things. He was examining his cut finger carefully. When he left in search of a bandage, I realized he'd actually said, "This knife is sharp."

Then, my father pulled the crank, the gears caught, and the cider mill muttered obstinately for having been put to work. I poured a bucket of apple quarters into the funnel at the top. With a gag, the mill chewed through apple meat. The cider leaking into the basin attracted bees. They arrived sleepy and left drunk. Sometimes the bees mired in the shredded apple while the press squeezed down. They became the tang in the flavor, we believed.The shredded apples became like cakes, molded into the circular form of the bucket. We fed them to the horses. And at the end of the day, the once white cheesecloth was stained caramel brown. Clinging to the soft veil was a crusted shell of amber bubbles that hardened before they could pop.

To siphon the cider out of the crock, we had a length of surgical tubing. My father emptied his lungs and sucked on one end. Cider snaked out. It filled his mouth, shot up his nostril, then poured into the first of the jugs as he quickly stuffed the tube's end into the jug's open mouth. "Kind of tart; zippy," he coughed, wiping his face. I always thought that we would run out of jugs to fill. Just one year, I wanted there to be so much cider we couldn't bottle it all. I craved a surplus just for the wonder and amazement of it. But we always had as much cider as we had jugs, never any more.

When we left Nana happy in her kitchen, left for home with the trunk of our car loaded with cider jugs and apples, my mother looked sadly at a fallen apple tree. There was no point in replacing it, she said. It wouldn't grow and bear fruit fast enough.

After Papa and Nana died, my mother and her brother sold the house with two apple trees left in the yard. My father took the rickety press back to Minnesota and rebuilt it with stronger timber.

We still make cider, cranking the press in my parents' driveway each October. We buy windfall apples from a nearby orchard. They seem smaller and the cider lacks zip. But we always have fresh cider in autumn and the stories change every year. MM

Nathan Scott Herzog lived in Minnesota for 20 years and attended Bethel College. He lives in Boston.