Apple is the Smell of Fall

I made two apple pies the other night.  The only reason – a friend gave me some apples.  These were not the grocery store exemplars – shiny, perfectly shaped, waxy skinned, Eve-inviting – no, these are the fallen-from-the-trees today apples . . . with insect-chewed breaks in the skin and bruises from the fall and the odd worm hole here and there – green with just a hint of red coming on.  These are the evidences of God’s bounty – food that literally falls from the trees with no effort or thought from its human and other-crittered consumers and probably not all that much thought or effort on the part of the trees themselves.

When it’s fall, apples, you see, just happen.

I wonder why autumn is variously referred to as fall and then think on the apples letting go of their tree

purchase – free fall sounding throughout the woods this time of year –

I don’t know if that’s the answer, the reason, but it delights me, this idea that we call autumn ‘fall’ because the harvest is falling into our hands.

Bidden or unbidden, Carl Jung wrote, God is present.

And so are the apples.


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Why do we in the western hemisphere call this season ‘fall’?  One theory is because leaves ‘fall’ from the tree (at least in the US, we are that literal).  Another opines that this is the season when the sun ‘falls’ below the equator.  The Brits will love this one: supposedly the Americans (translate: from the US) cannot spell ‘autumn’, so opted for the easier ‘fall’ instead.  Another points out that ‘faellen’ (Old English for ‘the fall of the leaf’) is the origin, bringing us full circle, much like the seasons themselves.