Apple Orchards and Necessary Dormancy
Embracing the pauses on the way to fruition
Today the air is frosty and still, the streets quiet. The packed and busy streets of last night, filled with walkers and cars of trick-’o-treaters, are gone. There is a lift, a pause in time that has been harried and full. Now comes November. Now comes another deepening season, an end and a turn.
I’ve written before about how much I love this time, its further lean into decay and dormancy.1 The older I get, the more I appreciate unvarnished honesty, and November embodies this—the inevitable decline we all face. I know most people shy from this reality, and I do, too, most of the time. Who wants to face the uncontrollable creep of death? The deepening lines, the dull and graying hair in the mirror are harsh and unremitting. All the hygienic care and products in the world can’t stop aging and the spectral threat behind it. I usually wince and turn away from the mirror.
I also bury myself in the mountain of work before me.
Currently, next to the dresser, I can see a stiff bag full of music, calendars, and lectionary schedules that point to special music planning at our church in the weeks and months to come. Another pile behind me lies school grant work, submitted and drafted proposals, PR examples, and other philanthropy information for our children’s classical Lutheran school. To my left are binders and books of vocal instruction and planning for vocal students and music coordination at Luther Classical College.2 Bookshelves to my right spill over with books I’ve read since February and I’ve been meaning to record in my planner and to then put away in our reading nook, and next to the shelves are TBR piles and other vocal reference books. Bins of seasonal items to be sorted and purged and put away in my closet are by a window. A basket of overflowing clean laundry sits by another beach bag peeking behind it, full of medical bills needing filing. A box of unopened school fundraiser items is covered by a few of my husband’s clothes needing hanging. There are other, smaller piles, too. All of it comprises undeniable physical evidence that points to family management, volunteer work, paid jobs, and things needing doing that I deeply care about.
Mental load and its subsequent physiological manifestations are real and heavy, I can tell you. This isn’t a complaint; it’s my simple acknowledgment of what in my life is. I’m continuing to learn and be humbled by my shortcomings in juggling this and prioritizing. And I’m indebted to people like Kerri Christopher and Ivana Greco who write about discernment, and how to clearly think about it and practice it. Recently, Ivana spoke to this in a post to homeschoolers, but which is applicable to many parents:
In my opinion, one of the most important things to do […] is regularly sit down … or go for a walk … or whatever works for you — and consider: what AM I doing? Is it too much? How can I do less? This is not a one time question, but a recurring process of discernment that is quite difficult to do.
Yes, yes, yes. It is certainly, absolutely, quite difficult to take time and space to think about what is before me. Even taking a walk or scrawling on a piece of paper can feel too self-serving when there is so much else around to do! I have and am still learning that it is far easier to be carried along on the overwhelming tide of claims and duties and lists and requests and texts and emails, addressing immediate needs like I’m frenetically bailing a leaking boat. That works, for a while at least. But it is a terrible way to live deliberately and purposefully. It suffocates joy, and it drowns contentment. It can lead to burnout. Without a pause, without a lift, the inexorable flood that this life and season can demand is too exhausting.
And it really doesn’t have to be this way.
This brings me back to November. A few of my children have been saying in the last week, “After Halloween, I just wish it could be Thanksgiving/December/Christmas already!” And I know why they feel that way. The full and rich bounty of those special holidays brings so much meaning and, indeed, purpose to our lives. As Christians, we live in hope, and our cyclical feasting points to the fulfillment of all hope in the coming resurrection and return of Christ that is both now and not yet.3 So this is precisely why we need Novembers and penitential seasons. We need the spaces to reflect between feast days, to pray and perhaps fast, to discipline and to remember, and to sit in our waiting.4 Otherwise, the feasts would make little sense, and their lavish abundance would be a surfeit, a bloated and empty overindulgence.
I’m reminded of our trip in early September to an orchard. When we lived in Minnesota for a decade, we had an annual rite of autumn where we would visit Stonegate Orchard, a lovely forty-five minute drive from our home to a lush and vibrant place, filled with bees and the soft scent of many kinds of swelling fruit. In late September or early October, we’d pick bushels and bushels of apples to take home.
I have pictures of all of our visits to Stonegate, and they fill me with gratitude. On our trip there in 2013, our fourth child was a week old, and I must’ve carried him. Or maybe I wasn’t there that year, and my husband took the pictures. I don’t honestly remember. It was a very blurry season then, too, of four children five years old and younger. But the air was crisp, and the apples were plentiful and delicious, and the time there was sweet and special, as were all of our visits.
Nearly every year, here in Wyoming, I’ve looked for orchards we could possibly visit. We live in a high desert, if you didn’t know, so there haven’t been any that I could find unless we drove to all the way to Colorado. But then a friend shared that she’d found Young’s Apple Box Orchard over in tiny Lingle, Wyoming, way on the eastern side of the state. We planned to go in 2024, but then there was a late cold and unseasonal weather, and the apples didn’t ripen, so the orchard wasn’t even open last year. But this year, Young’s was back, and I set aside an entire Saturday in September to make the trek. It’s over 100 miles from us, and a solid two-hour drive one way. But the distance didn’t matter. We were going to an orchard.
We took a simple picnic lunch and piled into the van, all ten of us, plus my mother along again (bless Grandma!). A little stiff and very ready for movement, after a few hours we opened the doors to that unmistakable waft of apple-sweet scent on the air, the air warm and perfumed, the sunshine bright. And what was that constant soft sound? Water! Bubbling streams wound their way through the orchard’s sections. Only when you live far from water can you appreciate how vital and lush its mere sound is, a refreshing wash to the ears.
The Christian owners of Young’s, a retired pastor and his wife, gave us a pile of empty paper apple bags. Their welcome and kindness were palpable. They only asked for donations, and if we could weigh our pickings when we were finished to add to their records. Their generosity was gift upon gift. The kids ran through the trees to the first section, pulling the wagon we’d brought and hauling the baby, who crowed with happiness.
Compared to Stonegate, Young’s was tiny. Many of the apples were small, which made sense. Even with the ready water, this was still Wyoming—hardly a hospitable climate for growing fruit. Evidences of timely care were everywhere, from netting around vulnerable plants, twine and stakes to keep small saplings upright, strips of fluorescent plastic tied to branches of trees that held that day’s pickable apples. Every single apple was a minor miracle. Even in early September, I could tell about half of the ready apples had been picked, and we were getting to the end of the good stuff. Though leaves were just yellowing, autumn was closing in.
The pastor came by and shared with us that his favorites were a certain type of crab apple. I was skeptical, and he knew it. “Here—try this,” he said, his wrinkled hands handing me a rosy fruit hardly bigger than a golf ball. I bit into it and marveled. Crisp and sweet, it rivaled Honeycrisp in flavor and texture. The baby ate one practically all the way through, core and all, while I found as many ripe crab apples as I could. After picking over fifty pounds of apples, and getting some great family pictures, we thanked the owners profusely. We picnicked and headed home, sticky-fingered and satisfied.
We still have apples in our garage fridge from Young’s. Our time there, and the fruit we still enjoy, are markers of waiting and time. Now far away at the orchard, the bony branches blow in the deepening cold, the remains of rotting apples hardening into the ground. Now is a time turning to dormancy, to what looks like only barrenness and death. But it is a time of rest and sleep, a deepening that will turn again to new life and growth, and God willing, another season come to fruition.
I am not an apple tree, but I am a woman in need of seasons of rest and reflection. The apples remind me that good fruition takes time and nurture, patience, sometimes slow unfurling and sometimes rapid, almost painful growth. It takes times that look like nothing is happening, and others that look like too much is happening. So much of our current family life involves people in varying stages and seasons, various studies and paid work, and the necessary and inevitable overlap of touching lives means friction, discomfort, mess, crazy schedules, and yes, fatigue. But it will not always be this way. It isn’t always this way.
So I am taking today, and the coming month, to reassess what it is I am doing, and in turn why I am here. While I have already been doing this in my head in the last few months, I know that to sit and put it down in words, like I am beginning here, is vital. My vocations, those roles that comprise my place here on earth, need self-assessment and care, because they are gifts that point to something and Someone yet to come. Much like a measured look, a thoughtful inhale to smell, a touch of bark or branch in an orchard point to what is to come, I pray to hold to this truth:
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. 19 For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; 21 because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. 23 Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. 24 For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.
I’ve wanted to write about this here, but I also don’t want my Substack to be a wordy version of LinkedIn, which I haven’t updated in months (years?) either. The short version is I’ve been working as a part-time grant writer for our children’s school for over a year after doing it as a volunteer for years, and I also now teach a few voice students and help with some coordination in the music department at LCC. I need to write about these efforts, mostly to help me articulate how and why they are so meaningful to me and, indeed, to our family and Lutheran community. But that’s for another post or two.
Every Sunday is a mini-Resurrection, in which we receive Christ in His Word and in His body and blood. He gives Himself to us now, and not yet has He come again. We live in the in between tension of those realities.
Today is the feast of All Saint’s Day, which we will observe at church tomorrow. It’s one of my favorites, not least because it, like November itself, looks beyond the world’s inevitable decay to what is coming.
I always appreciate reading your thoughts. You are doing so much, and bearing so much fruit, and God is blessing so many others through you. Praying for you to be granted wisdom and rest and even...a little...dormancy.