How ya like them apples?

As a kid, my mom used to pack me a lunch every day for school. Lunch was my favorite part of the day, and I anxiously awaited the time when I could run to my locker, grab my waterproof, stain-resistant LL Bean lunchbox, and open it up to reveal all the delicious treats inside. Most of the kids would order lunches from the cafeteria, but those lunches never had enough food for me. I needed a true New England lunch, which usually looked like this:

2 sandwiches on wheat bread
A nalgene bottle of apple cider, lemonade, or grape juice
Tupperware container full of chunky homemade apple sauce, made from the apples of our own tree
An apple or two from a recent apple-picking excursion
Oatmeal-raisin cookies
String cheese
Yogurt

Note the recurrence of apples here. Any true New Englander knows that apples make up an important part of every school boy's lunch. I was lucky because we had our own apple tree, but you didn't really eat those apples unless they were made into a pie, pressed into cider, or mashed into applesauce. The reason for this was because we never sprayed the apples with pesticides, so they were pretty gnarled and disfigured. But that didn't mean that, once manipulated into some other medium, they were any less delicious. A true New Englander knows that, unless you're a farmer trying to make a living off your produce, pesticides are a major no-no. That said, apple-picking excursions were always a staple of my New England fall. Basket in hand, I would lead the charge and climb the trees without the provided ladders because that's how New Englanders have been doing it for generations.

-Freeport Francis