The Ghost Orchard | 
@JamieArc I never posted our #AuldLangSpine toast…mostly because I failed SPECTACULARLY at pouring from a great height! 😂🙈 I‘m gonna blame it on not wanting to create a delicious, appley flood in our friend‘s apartment. It‘s even harder than I imagined!
I stopped at our local cidery to grab a bottle for our #AuldLangSpine toast, @JamieArc , and they had the cutest “Christmas tree” outside! 🎄
I honestly love our little town. 😊
pickFirst read-through done. I'm planning to read this one again, but more deeply this time. Helen has tons to teach me and I'm ready to learn.
This year, I am choosing to read deeply. Each book I read this year I plan to use to teach myself better writing and research skills. Here I go with the tagged book!
One more (completely off-season 😆) vintage apple-bobbing image & I promise I‘ll be done. 🤞🏻
(Also, I added the tagged book to my TBR back when @Lindy was posting about it. I haven‘t read it yet but it looks SO GOOD — lyrical & informative. The fact that most enticed me was that there was a Quaker woman, “Annie Appleseed”, whose history predates Johnny‘s but who — of course — you never hear about. How cool is that?!).
pickI re-read this little gem this weekend as part of my Helen Humphreys re-read project. I told her that I didn't even know that I was interested in apples until I read this book! She skillfully combines reflections on the loss of a friend with a detailed history of apples (and people who love apples) in North America. Excellent book through and through.🍎🍏
I'm re-reading all of Helen Humphreys - so I'm a bit of a broken record right now! 😍📚
Another Helen Humphreys post?? Yes! I'm just trying to relive my writing retreat through photos. The Ghost Orchard is amazing! This lecture by Helen Humphreys on narrative was amazing! 😍
I guess it‘s time to take down the Day of the Dead decorations at our house. We put them up for a literary salon that we hosted on November 1. A dozen of us gather monthly to read aloud, and the theme was an obvious choice this time. I chose a few passages from Ghost Orchard.
A busy reading month: lots of great books. 🐝😀
I thought it was optimistic of Robert Frost to plant an orchard when he was an old man close to death, because I am an optimistic person and could imagine doing that myself. But Frost wrote in one of his notebooks about planting the orchard as a way to reach forward into the future, so that his life stretched back into his past but also forward into a future he would never witness. He called it ‘the longing for extension in both ways.‘
The Seneca burial mound at Kanadesaga, although protected in the initial bill of sale to the white settlers, was later built on. In the 1950s, there was a diner on the site. The owners, who discovered artifacts and skeletons of the Seneca dead, called their restaurant the Indian Mound Diner.
pickThis history of apples defies categorization. It‘s meticulous and documented research; fascinating facts; fictionalized biography; memoir and a lament for a recently-deceased friend. At #VWF2017, Humphreys said she was looking at three different groups that don‘t own the narrative of history: Indigenous people, women and trees. Lyric, compact and elegant, illustrated with antique watercolours of apples.
At a #VWF2017 event, John Freeman told the audience he lives with a literary agent who represents Anne Carson & Claudia Rankine. She says, judging by what she sees coming across her desk, that essays & the forms between forms are where it‘s at now. I would say that both of the books I‘ve photographed are forms outside of standard memoir or nonfiction.
Humphreys: "'Scrumping' is a 19th century term, meaning to take the windfalls or the apples that remain on a tree after the harvest."
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Me: I recognize that word! My next door neighbour, who‘s originally from Yorkshire, made hard cider from local apples and brought some over to me. She called it scrumpy.??
I‘m not sure what is or isn‘t currently private property & how much I‘m trespassing, so I dart about, furtively conducting my measurements & taking photographs. I feel alternately like a detective & a crazy person. Several cars slow down while I am measuring the girth of the bifurcated tree with the sewing tape measure I keep in the glovebox of my car. I found it years ago lying in the middle of a road & it has proven to be unexpectedly useful …
Memory becomes its own ghost orchard.
There should be a word for how the dead continue and don't continue, for how the fact of them gives over to the thought of them.
The majority of the old indigenous apples are extinct. The Cullawhee came from Jackson County NC and was once the largest apple ever grown. A single apple measured 21 inches in circumference.
(Internet photo)
Thoreau believed that one's thoughts were different outside than they were indoors, and that apples eaten outdoors tasted far superior to those that were consumed inside.
It probably wasn't a man who went west to grow apple trees but a woman. An old woman. A Quaker. And this same woman had journeyed to England in the late 1700s and brought back apple scions from trees there and had planted numerous orchards throughout the southern states. Because of this, she became known as Annie Appleseed—and predated Johnny Appleseed by almost 50 years.
Regarding 50 watercolour artists creating the fruit encyclopedia for the USDA, from 1887 to 1940: they produced an astonishing 7,584 detailed paintings of different varieties of fruit and nuts, including 3,807 paintings of apples."
It is an intimate act, tasting an apple—having the flesh of the fruit in our mouths, the juice on our tongues.
A spirited child, Deborah was interested in art right from the beginning; she even attempted to draw flowers using their own juices, which she got from chewing the flower and spitting out the liquid contained within to use as a pigment.
Got my suitcase packed, tickets and program, passport and, most important, a stack of reading material for a week at the Vancouver Writers Fest. I'm ready to go! 😀
pickThis was a good read! I learned a lot about apples!!! I think this was a good start to Fall kind of book!! I enjoyed this more than I thought I would! I'm quite pleased I had the opportunity to start Fall off in this way!!
I wasn't sure at first how I would feel about this book! I'm usually more of a fiction girl!! I'm actually finding this really interesting! Not quite halfway through but hopefully I knock it out!
Such a perfect quote about grief and loss! One year ago today my beloved Aunt Moe passed away. She was a librarian who encouraged and supported my love of reading. I'm feeling her loss so much today!
pickThis was a beautiful little book which was partially a detailed history of apples, partially a project of Humphreys reflecting on the death of a close friend and celebrating her with a little bit of fiction sprinkled in. Honestly I wouldn't read a close history of apples by many authors but everything Humphreys writes is so gorgeous. She uncovered such tender narratives of friendship and love in her research and weaves them in so skillfully.
My coworkers were making fun of me yesterday when I said I started a book about the history of apples! None of them thought it sounded interesting! It actually is pulling me in!!
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Sinking into The Ghost Orchard. There's nothing like reading a new book by one of your favourite authors. 🍎📚😍
I CANNOT believe I didn't know that Helen Humphreys had a new book!!! I must read this asap!! I love everything she writes! #queerbooks http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/helen-humphreys-latest-book-is-a-hybrid-of-...
20 works of Canadian non-fiction to watch for this fall. I want to read them all!
http://www.cbc.ca/books/20-works-of-canadian-nonfiction-to-watch-for-this-fall-1...
I just found out that Humphreys has a new book! Description: "For readers of H is for Hawk and The Frozen Thames, The Ghost Orchard is award-winning author Helen Humphreys‘ fascinating journey into the secret history of an iconic food. Delving deep into the storied past of the apple in North America, Humphreys explores the intricate link between agriculture, settlement, and human relationships." Yay! ?
