there is wonder in the days spent apple picking in grandma and grandpa's backyard.

I'm sitting here eating my second baked apple of the day (oops) and the walnuts are crackling and I'm drizzling the sweet brown sugar turned crunchy caramel onto the next bite. While I'm a sucker for a good pie, some homemade ice-cream, or even a well-made cake, sometimes the simple and humble food is my favorite. Especially when there is so much meaning baked into the dish. The apples are from my grandpa's backyard, and I daresay they're sweeter because of that fact. I wrote about apple picking Sundays last year, but I'll never be able to do those lovely days justice.

I've grown up donning old t-shirts and oftentimes mittens worn from continual use to spend Saturdays or Sundays picking apples. My grandparents backyard is a veritable treasure of homemade and homegrown goodness -- twenty one apple trees (last I counted) are thick with fruit, several raspberry patches give us yellow and red raspberries with unparalleled sweetness, a vineyard with three rows plus grape vines trailing the fence on the property, an enormous garden that seems to be bursting with vegetables and always more tomatoes than we can handle, and all on three acres of glorious property that has been my home away from home ever since I was born. So, it stands to reason that growing up with this tradition of apple picking Saturdays (or Sundays) has stuck with me. We'll spend days plucking the apples from trees, only to spend hours and hours slicing, mashing, stewing, or pressing them for apple sauce, cider, or pies, crisps, and crumbles.

By the end of the day, our hands are pruny and everyone smells like apples -- the scent is sticky in the air and you can always find a discarded seed somewhere on your shirt or in your hair. But the reward is the best part. We'll come home with bags of apples, jugs of cider, and container after container filled with the sweetest, richest apple sauce you can find. More wonderful than that is the fact that we worked to create the very treats we'll be savoring all autumn and into the cold winter months, when all we're longing for is a bit of freshness.

I can't express in words how much our family tradition, as simple and understated ("who wants to go help pick apples?") means to me. I love that my grandparents have left a legacy through their day to day life, through the things that are ordinary and normal to us that have become something precious and more than special. That the beautiful simplicity that makes up picking, stewing, and pressing apples will become a story that is told for generations. A story about how family is first and how as a family, we do life together -- the simple, everyday, sometimes hard, mostly beautiful, full of joy that is waiting to be discovered, whimsical moments of life. And I am so thankful that apple picking Sundays are a part of my story.

Someday, when I am old and a mother and a grandmother, I will be bouncing a little on my lap and telling them stories of apple picking Sundays. How we wore our hair in pony tails and threw the rotten apples into the pond and to make sure a tree was ready, we picked an apple that everyone handed around and bit. How our fingers were like prunes after slicing countless apples and how the smell was thick in the air. How everyone was secretly racing to fill their bag first and how we'd climb into the tree itself to pull apples from the highest branches. How the words, "who wants to go help pick apples?" were some of the best to hear. Simple stories, everyday stories, honest stories. Stories that matter, because the ordinary moments make up the depth of our life, and beauty is found in the simple and everyday.

When I was a girl and had freckles on my face, I picked apples in my grandparents backyard and it was one of my favorite things ever...

This is a little of our Sunday. Later, I'm sharing a recipe for the best baked apples you'll ever have. Simple, understated, and a bit like home. Just like our Sundays at Grandma and Grandpa's.

Happy Friday.