How to describe it? I could say that When I was younger, I met an elfish 84-year-old man who grew apples that had been grown along the shore for over 400 years, brought here by the Acadians, who knew stories about how apples used to be ground in Britain before the freedom-hating European Union existed, when presses could be made of wood, and when there were no rules, and about how he liked to talk trash when we ground apples to make cider each autumn, trash about how the gym was a waste of time, and who needed the gym when you had an antique apple press to grind, and how I was going to hell if I ate imported fruit, and how my girlfriend might be going to hell because she ate a mango last week (see you there), and how it was a waste of time to shoot film because we were all going to burn up anyway, in hell or in a wildfire or in the end of the world. That it was all going to end in overexposure. And that like a fairy tale, the press he ground on was embossed with his name, though it was made 150 years before he was born, how its paint was apple red, or how the light in his orchard was always dappled and golden, the slant light of early autumn.
Or, another way, that There was a maniac who lived down the road who knew that, like an inversion of the fairy tale Snow White, an apple graft cut should never know human touch at the cleft, or the graft might fail. That a day in the fairy world was seven days here. That dreams meant more than reality. Scrumpy. A rustic apple cider. From the forgotten verb scrumping, to go stealing apples from your neighbour’s orchard.
A wild year for apples, cultivated or wild. A drought year. When trees that hadn’t produced in decades grew apples that tasted like a dream. A year that it didn’t rain. A year when the bombs fell, or they didn’t. When, in grainy black and white video, Hellfire missiles were seen to bounce off UFOs, and keep going. When we found out that our strangest fantasies are live, and being recorded. But down the road is a man who knows what linseed oil is still used for, and what neem oil is, and the letters on his apple press still faintly show his name.
