Our next door neighbors have these two apple trees on their property that my dead friend Alice planted many years ago. The are huge now and every year, we fail to get apples from them. This year, I decided to give the apples a fighting chance – I learned that each flower makes a cluster of apples like this:
And it’s too much for the tree to produce this many apples, so you have to thin them down to one per cluster. So I patiently did that with the clusters I could reach from the ground or a little step stool. And then because I didn’t want to spray the entire thing with pesticide, I bagged each little one with an organza bag that you usually get tiny gifts in. Only after I ordered 50 or 100 of them from Amazon and started to bag my darling apples did I realize I should have bought them in green and not white. Oh well. So I estimate I did about 20 of these bagged apples – hoping to yield at least one for me and one for my neighbor and maybe…one for Alice’s grave. I guess Alice’s grave goes first, right? I’m not sure. Yesterday, I walked outside and four little baggies were one the ground! I was saddened. We’ve had so many storms – I’m not sure what happened to bring those particular baggies down – a curious deer? Maybe all my bags are destined to be on the ground.
We went to Friday Vibes and had Chik-Fil-A (which was delicious) and also Whole Foods chantilly berry sheet cake (someone’s birthday) which was also delicious. This is Jeremy and Edda talking to Tara (the Director of Main Street) who is such a huge bundle of energy, it’s hard to even describe how much good will and happiness she radiates.
Now that I go to church, I have a ready audience for my baking – so I have been baking weekly whatever makes me happy. I find chocolate things to be difficult to make – it’s hard to put the cocoa in and have it be either not too dense, nor too dry. I’ll work on that. But I also wanted to work on making frosting decorations, so I ordered a bunch of tips and Felix and I experimented with this play frosting you can make (not from butter, but from shortening instead) reuse over and over again for practice.
And so we practiced! Not too bad.
