Change

There is a bittersweet flavor to the transition from summer to fall: the days get shorter, the days cooler, and the nights more pleasant, and apple season is upon us in earnest.

Our nearby orchard produces scrumptious apples, a little tart, which I prefer, and which make for perfect pies. Now that, thanks to The Joy of Cooking, I have finally figured out how to fully cook the bottom crust of my fruit pies and how to avoid having a soupy pie, baking end-of-summer-start-of-fall apple pies is a lot more fun. I'm just sorry that my dad, who loved my apple pie, didn't get to taste my perfected pièce-de-résistance above. He would have appreciated it very much.

In addition to the apple boom, fall weather brings outside fires, which my husband likes to build in the iron grate that we bought a year or so ago at a community flea market for all of 50 cents. There's plenty of small wood pieces strewn all over the yard to get the fire going and my husband keeps some of the firewood that we inherited from the previous owners of the house in our shed, to protect it from the elements. A lot of the firewood is decomposing at one side of the yard precisely because the former owners didn't protect it from rain, etc.

Inside the house, my husband has set up the sewing machine that I inherited from my abuela, her last Singer from the 1960s, in my office. I found a man who restores Singers in the nearby town and he gave it back to me almost unrecognizable in its improvement. I've started taking a beginning quilting class, which will meet for the next eight weeks, and I've started work on a small, quilted fall-inspired wall hanging (nothing fancy or ambitious). I've quilted once before, in 2008, but have basically forgotten it all and tonight had the hardest time trying to figure out how to get the bobbin to work with the needle of my abuela's machine!