Cider

My son is off school today and the apples set really hard this year—to the point where enormous branches are breaking off because they can’t hold up all the fruit—so we went out and picked five gallons of apples, mostly windfalls, to make cider. His processing job was to hack the apples to pieces, which he enjoyed very much. My job was to run the pieces through the food processor to turn them into tiny bits. Then we fed them into my grandmother’s old juice press, taking turns twisting the augur and holding the press on the countertop (it’s inclined to torque around and fly off). And shazam: in ninety minutes we had turned five gallons of fruit into exactly one gallon of cider. And this cider is delicious. The flavor is not over-sweet—it is tart and sweet both, and just right.

GOOSE FENCE UPDATE

The Administration advises you to leave your geese alone. You can spend as much time as you want, devising ways to improve their lot, and five minutes later they will discover that badly patched place where you overlapped the ends of two short pieces of fence, and they will all start coming and going that way in perfect happiness.