The first apples

Nothing about this year's harvest is going anywhere near a bottle or a jar. The trees are three years old, still thin, still more stake than trunk in places, and most of what's growing on them right now is leaf, not fruit.

But there is fruit. Small, mostly still green, a few blushing red early. Not enough to pick with any real purpose. Enough to walk the rows and actually find one, which a year ago wasn't true.

This is the part of an orchard that doesn't photograph as a finished product and isn't meant to. It's just what three years of a tree in the ground actually looks like, before it's four, then five, then whatever a mature apple harvest here eventually becomes.

We picked one. It was sour, small, and completely beside the point. The point was that it existed at all.