Misadventures of the Monster Librarian

“Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, of confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or insignificant, but of being part of a rich and complex narrative.” - John Burnside Spencer apples...I think Rows of Heaven! Drooling like Homer Simpson just thinking about these. Can you guess where we went last week?     The Farm took a group of about 20 people to a local apple orchard where we then spent over an hour and a half gathering dropped apples, said apples are now being made into applesauce and apple cider with the Farm's own apple press.  My boss Flava Flav let me go and I couldn't have been happier. The afternoon, one of those ridiculously bucolic New England ones with a  sky so baby blue, soft, downy clouds and a warm sun; air just hinting at cool, but comfortable enough to go sans sweaters; leaves vibrant with searingly vivid hues of orange, yellow and red EVERYWHERE; each New England curve in the road wrappe...

Avalon (our house) smells like fall tonight; it even seems like a fall day outside right now: 62 degrees Farenheit, windy and rainy. Why, you ask, does it smell like fall in our house? Well, with the breeze and the rain it felt perfect for a fire, then add to that the smell of boiling apples and voila! you have the scent of fall. Why, you ask, am I boiling apples? Well, the apple trees (pictured right) outside our back door (which produce a MacIntosh-ish looking apple) and another tree at the edge of the road (which produce a yellow apple) are what Bob, the Farm's nature/woods/weather expert, calls early apples. Apple that are considered early apples are, as the term suggests, earlier to bloom than most other varieties, whose fruit comes into season meaning they come in to season in thef fall. The apples on said early fruiting trees has just been dropping into our yard for a little over a week and while I love running over the apples with the lawn m...