An orchard in a glass

Above: the young orchard in the farmyard at Courtomer

Monday, December 18, 2023

Dear Valued Customer,

Jane and Franck brought us a couple of bottles of apple juice the other day. They had made it themselves with a group of friends and their own apples.
 
“Quelle odeur délicieuse !” 
 
The scent of freshly pressed apples rose from the glass. And with it, like wraiths dimly perceived through a cloud, fragments of long ago.
 
I sat beside my father in the farm truck as he drove slowly through orchards, looking at apple buds forming on shiny twigs. It was a cold day in March. My father wore his old barn coat, made of tan canvas and lined with cotton fleece. It had deep pockets where he kept personal objects: a jack knife and matches, cigarettes, coins. Sometimes, rummaging inside them, I would find a lifesaver candy. His hands smelled like leather and tobacco. His fingers were rough, with bitten cuticles, but they stroked a child’s head with a gentle fondness that was all the more comforting for appearing to be absent-minded and distant.
 
I learned to drive sitting in his lap. The metal steering wheel of the truck was slippery with long use; the ridges for fingers were widely spaced for my small hands. It was a cold winter afternoon, the trees were bare against the white and grey sky; we bounced along the farm road in companionable silence on the way up to the house. 
 
The orchards were the locus of time spent with my father. We lived in the city during the week and only saw him at the end of the day, home from the office where he worked as a civil engineer. On weekends and holidays, we piled in the car and drove up to the family place in the Hudson River Valley. It was called Talavera, after the English victory over Napoleon in 1809, the year the main house was built. Here, my father’s father had planted acres of apple orchards in the 1920s. 
 
Boyhood correspondence my father had saved and that I read many years later were full of instructions and advice from my grandfather on apples and the management of the farm. As an adolescent, my father had spent a few school vacations there while his parents were abroad and his older brother was in college. 
 
My father’s father had married late in life. Born at the end of the Civil War, he was already 60 at my father’s birth. His two sons took over management of the farm early in their own lives, as a continuation of filial duty. Although they both had careers outside farming, raising apples was a lifelong occupation. To us, their children, it was the setting for our own and our extended family’s life.
 
My grandfather was not a professional farmer, either. He was a lawyer, a soldier, a politician, and finally a civil servant. When he’d left my father in boarding school and on the farm, it was because he’d taken a post in Central America. He had inherited the family place from his own father, who had it turn inherited it from his older brother, dead of Yellow Fever during the Civil War. Apples paid for the upkeep of the land and kept a roof on the big house.
 
By the time we were growing up, apples were indissociable from every aspect of life at Talavera. Gathered in the drawing room after lunch, standing in the kitchen on the way out the back door, the adults discussed late frosts, apple scab, spray rigs, cold storage. A rainfall record was taped to the refrigerator door.
 
Out of season, the orchards and the barns were deeply peaceful. As spring stretched into summer, the orchard grass grew long, and pulled at your feet. The tree branches filled with deep green leaves. You could stretch out under the canopy and look up through the network of limbs to the blue sky and clouds. 
 
The barns smelled pleasantly of powdery dirt and dust, and in the machine shop, there was the rich and mysterious odor of oil and diesel gas. There was a gas pump in front of the old stables where we filled up the tractors and the farm truck.
 
In the late summer, the migrant pickers arrived in their big cars. They lived in our farmhouse, on a hill overlooking the barns. They went out into the orchards with long ladders and picking buckets slung over their shoulders. The sides of the bucket were rigid, but the bottom was made of soft canvas. When it was full, you loosened a cord and unloaded the fruit into bushel crates. Apples bruise easily and then rot; our foreman kept an eye on the pickers to make sure their zeal in filling the crates was not at the expense of the precious cargo.
 
As the harvest came in, the barns filled with the pickers’ wives and girlfriends, and women from the surrounding countryside and town. They had the job of sorting the fruit as it went past them on a canvas conveyor belt. Half-shouts and laughter sounded over the clatter of belts and machinery.
 
It was a world we observed from a distance. There was strong language, as I overheard my grandmother warning my mother. Rough behavior. Also, machinery with gears that could pull off a finger, and tractors hauling wagonloads of fruit. We knew to keep out of the way.
 
The house engaged all our attention. It bustled with activity. Our great-aunt would arrive with Mary, her cook and housekeeper. Aunt Lee, who never married, had studied the piano in Germany, helped start the first kindergarten in New York City, run for public office, and taught in men’s prisons. She had taken our father to the 1939 World’s Fair, fearlessly mounted all the rides, and lost her hat on the roller coaster. Mary’s specialty was apple pie, which was almost more interesting. I watched her roll out the dough for the pie crust. It was thin, crisp, and melting with lard. The smell of cooked apples steamed through the kitchen. 
 
As the harvest drew to a close, we looked forward to the County Fair. Mike, the foreman, would put his glasses in his breast pocket and drive out to the orchards. The apples were  planted in sections, referred to by their numbers and varieties. Number 16, for instance, was where Delicious apples were to be found. All the New York apples were grown --  the deep red Cortland with snow-white flesh, the Empire, Macoun, Spy, Rome, Jonathan, McIntosh, and what was then a new hybrid, the Idared. It was a proud moment when we arrived at the Fair and inspected the apple display under the bright lights of the tent . There would always be at least one blue ribbon for our apples. The rest of the evening we spent on rides and failing to win carnival games.
 
When the harvest was done, we still had drops. They lay in the grass under the trees, growing soft and ever sweeter. A neighbor would come in and haul them away for making cider. He often gave us a few gallons. One year, we children found a cider press in one of the barns. We  tried to make cider ourselves. But although we washed the wooden barrel and crusher thoroughly, the juice still tasted like dust and old wood. It was nothing like the cider our neighbor made. The crunch of a fresh apple was far more satisfying.
 
All winter long, crates of apples were kept stacked in the vestibule of our house in the city. We took apples to school and gave them to our classmates. My mother made applesauce. She added a few spiralled coils of red skin to give it a rosy tint. I learned to make apple pie.
 
As I grew older, I wanted to help with the orchards. My father showed me how to prune a tree. When the wholesale fruit business was no longer particularly profitable in New York’s stony hills, he and his brother shifted the operation to “pick-your-own.” We children spent autumn weekends showing customers the way to the various sections, handing out crates and wooden baskets for picking, taking the money. My older cousins and I even sorted apples on the old conveyor belt. I learned how to add quickly, and also that the customer is always right. On Sunday nights, the whole family gathered in the dining room for the final tally. It was thrilling when we broke a record, worrying when rain had kept the customers at home.
 
At 17, I went away to school. A year later, my father died. The land was divided; our cousins and their parents took over the orchards. 
 
Many years later, I went back.  My uncle and aunt were gone. The barns were empty; motes of dust swirled silently in shafts of light from the high windows. Out in the orchards, the remaining apple trees were overgrown with suckers; some of them had even grown around stakes. A few last apples lay on the ground turning golden brown, the air filled with the sweet and sour odor of their fermentation.
 
I meant to tell you in this Letter about our own small apple orchard, planted eight years ago here at Courtomer. But memory can take you by surprise. And perhaps it’s the time of the year. Conjured by the taste and scent of juice from sweet Normandy apples, here are the orchards of the old place.
 
            To a wonderful fête de Noël!
 

Jane and Franck brought us two bottles of their delicious fresh-pressed apple juice.

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We are taking bookings for 2024 and 2025.
Heather (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be delighted to help you with your enquiries and dates. And Jane will be happy to preview the property on site. She can also act as your concierge.
English and French spoken.

We look forward to hearing from you!