Perfection

I was standing on top of the ladder trying to push aside my disappointment along with the heavily laden branches of my apple tree. “What a shame—so many worm holes this year,” I grumbled as I examined the almost-beautiful apple cupped in my hand. About four out of five apples I picked had at least one worm hole. We had been too busy to keep up the spraying this year and now we were reaping the results. Even though sorely neglected, the apples had filled out well because of the perfect timing of the extra rain and strong winds we had at blossom and small fruit time. The result had been a thorough job of thinning! I hadn’t had time to start picking the apples until after our first frost, but that in itself was inadvertently adhering to my Grandma Smith’s advice of letting the first frost “set the sugar”…