We went to the farmer’s market this morning. It’s still so early in the season, I knew there wouldn’t be much there but annuals, but I was hoping to get some more asparagus before the season was over, and Norah and I needed an adventure for the day, so we drove out to East Aurora. And we got the asparagus, plus a head of romaine for tonight’s salad, and some radishes, for eating on their own, sliced thin with a little bit of salt.

We also bought some apples. I stopped at the apple lady’s stall on the way out–she was selling mostly cookies and pies, but she had a few baskets of Empires and Granny Smiths. Figuring that a fall apple that’s local has got to be better, in one way or another, than a “fresher” apple that’s come all the way from Chile–or at least cheaper, anyway–I asked her how her apples were holding up. She handed me a small one to try. I took a bite and then shared it with Norah, the first time she had ever held an apple and just eaten it whole, all on her own. She loved it, you could tell she felt so grown up–except she couldn’t quite get the concept right and kept taking little bites near the stem. I waited outside the car for a full five minutes, while she turned that apple around and around in her hand, taking juicy mouthfuls here and there. She cried when I finally took it away.

So later that afternoon, when she woke up from her nap, true to my promise, I let her have an apple for her snack. We took it outside to eat in the grass. I gave it to her whole, and she marveled over it, just holding it and sniffing it and saying “mmmm” and pretending to take bites. But she wouldn’t eat it, so finally I cut it into wedges and put them into a bowl for her to carry around.

And oh, did she love those apple wedges. She’d pick one out of the bowl, hold it to her nose, take a big bite, then reach back into the bowl for another, to carry in her other hand. She’d take a bite of that one, then drop it on the ground and take another slice out of the bowl. Soon there were pieces of apple strewn all across the lawn. I tried to keep corralling them back into the bowl, blowing the grass off and segregating the ones that got too dirty to eat. Norah took her cue from me and started blowing on all her apple slices, little lips all pursed up into a great big pucker.

And all day long, till well into the evening, she kept thinking about that apple. In the car or at my feet in the kitchen, she’d suddenly say “appuhl.” “appuhl.” “eat.” “mmmm.” And I knew that she was saying, “Remember the apple, mama? That was fun.”