Bottling Sunshine- Publishing date TBC
Bottling Sunshine
“It’s difficult to judge how far the bruise has permeated the flesh isn’t it,” she muses, staring at the apple in her hand, “sometimes hardly at all; sometimes the bruise has penetrated to the core.”
The soft scraping sound of the peeler on flesh continues in the silence.
“I’ll get an automatic peeler for next year, I promise.” I announce, cheerily. “I’ve seen a beautiful red shiny one. You clamp it onto the table. Or we could invest in a press and then we wouldn’t have to peel.”
It’s another flaming red Saturday. Back from the hospital, we sit at Anna’s kitchen table and peel apples together as we have done every year since I moved in next door: the peel curls together into the huge bowl between us. Terracotta pots trailing nasturtiums flashing scarlet and vermillion frame our view into the garden where burnished rosy leaves blow in eddies through the orchard and on to the lawn: the sunset of the year.
I met Anna over the garden fence when I plucked an apple from one of her trees. Her garden was a fairytale: woven willow fences; teepees for climbing flowers; wandering chickens and a long washing line, propped up with a pole, where white sheets and tea towels danced in the breeze like spirits.
Of course the stolen apple was bittersweet- pure cider. Anna appeared, laughing, from behind the washing line, draped in freshly dried sheets and threw me another from the basket she was carrying.
“Let me give you this one,” she laughed, “It's a Red Love. It’s rosy red all the way through from skin to flesh. I’m going to juice some now.” she said, ”Come across. I’m Anna”
Cosied up in winter woolens, despite the fierce sunshine, she pulled her scarf tighter, and held out her gloved hand. I took it, stepped up onto a tree-stump and jumped down onto her side of the fence.
We sat in her warm kitchen at a table groaning with jam jars and bottles, surrounded by baskets of apples on the flag stone floor.
I drank the juice.Then her apple cake.Then her apple gin. I left clutching the cake recipe and stuck it on the fridge-It’s still there. That’s all it took.
“How’s little apple today?” asks Anna
I pull my top up a little, in reply, and show her my ripe round belly..
”Blossoming,” she says.
Each year, we spend days like this, preserving and stewing apples to bring sunshine and sweetness to the darker months ahead.
She writes “Red Love” on the labels in a shaky script.
“Bottling love and sunshine.” she laughs, as she carefully presses the side of the jar.
“In the bleaker months,” she continues, not looking at me, “you can revisit these golden autumn days. A jar of stewed apple, warmed through, is a portal. It will take you here: to our golden afternoons, nasturtiums flaming in terracotta pots, and apple cake at the kitchen table.
The wheel is turning: it brings autumn round again.
“Today,” I say, kissing Rosie Apple,” we are laying down joy for future us.”
Rosie laughs and rolls apples like balls across the kitchen floor.
We tie a red ribbon on the tree that leans into our garden: there are two there now.
Back inside I heat a jar of stewed apple for Rosie: we will bask in Anna’s red love at breakfast all winter.
Harriet Derioz, @somewhereinsomerset, writes through a seasonal lens. Living in a pink house in the apple lands of Somerset, her simple thing is stealing apples from next door.
