Adam's Apples

I grew up, pre–video console, loving board games of all kinds. Roll the dice. Spin the spinner. Take a card. Collect $200. Advance around the game board, tap tap tap.  ¶  One such that has not survived into the present day was Milton Bradley's Pirate and Traveler.  ¶  It was really two different games in one.

Last Sunday, irregularly observed in these parts as Talk Like A Pirate Day , I went a little nuts buying apples.

These Ashmead's Kernel apples glint and gleam in the autumn light like pieces of eight.

Left to right: Blushing Golden, Golden Russet, Esopus Spitzenberg It's December, and time to open up the chest of pirate booty and start eating those keeper apples you put down against the inevitable coming of winter.

Halloween marks the border between abundance and scarcity, between summer and winter, between the living and the dead.  ¶  Today we are well into hoarding time, scavanging time, pirate time , keeper time.

The trees at Red Apple Farm have been picked bare for weeks. My personal subtitle for this photo is, No cider for me next June.

There were 17 kinds of apples today at  Volante Farms  in  Needham, Mass. It's a good place to get apples in what I think of as pirate season , when orchard-fresh apples grow scarce but can still be found.