Greenstead Apple Festival October 2001
Greenstead Apple Festival
The first apple festival Marina and I attend together feels like a new beginning.
Not just the usual start-of-the-school-year new beginning, all the potential of unsharpened pencils and blank notebooks.
Not the new beginning of Greenstead’s tentative return to normalcy just a few years after the flood.
This is something more: our first time hanging out off school grounds after becoming fast friends on the first day of third grade just a month ago.
Fast friends is what my mom calls it, a term I never quite liked. Like fast food, it makes me think of something cheap, artificial. Our friendship may be new, but I know it’s something real.
I revel in the satisfying crunch of leaves beneath my feet as Marina and I trail after her mom and two older sisters through the crowded festival grounds.
We make a game out of finding the biggest, crunchiest leaves to stomp on, weaving through the booths and turning the entire park into an elaborate game of hopscotch.
When we bump into Marina’s twelve-year-old sister, she rolls her eyes and calls us immature.
Marina and I share a grin like we know a secret: Life is way more fun inside our bubble of friendship.
It’s so much better to be immature and together than aloof and alone.
How sad, I think to myself, that her sister doesn’t know that.
When we line up at the hot apple cider booth, I spend the entire time fingering the folded twenty-dollar bill in my pocket.
I’m ready to pay for my own, but Marina’s mom, a woman with big wavy hair and large brown eyes, hands the first cup of cider to me.
That gesture makes me feel like I’ve been formally accepted into the Ramos family, my friendship with Marina blessed and certified.
At the Lettie’s Confections booth, we discover that the caramel apple Marina and I both want—coated in crushed peanuts, drizzled with milk chocolate—is the last one left.
I tell Marina she can have it (I did receive the First Cup of Cider, after all), but she insists we share it.
Lettie, a grandmotherly Black woman with a gap-toothed smile and a short tuft of hair, runs it through her apple slicer and hands over a paper tray of peanut-chocolate-caramel apple slices in all their glory.
We sit at one end of a picnic table savoring our sweet, sticky apple slices while Marina’s eldest sister sits at the other end, daintily nibbling her plain caramel apple and pretending not to know us.
In the age of cooties, there’s something intimate about Marina and me eating from the same tray.
It feels like something fast friends don’t do.
I’ve had friends before, of course, but the two of us click in a way that feels new to me.
There’s an ease to our rapport; I never feel like I’m constantly searching for the right thing to say.
The focused way Marina talks to me makes me feel like she’s interested in me , not which Little Debbie snack cake I have in my lunchbox or whether my golden retriever Lisa Frank folder is cool enough.
Whether we’re trading erasers from our collections or sitting on the edge of the playground joking about our favorite Recess characters, time always flies by when we’re together.
That cider blessing doesn’t feel like enough anymore. I need confirmation, right from the source, that this friendship matters as much as I feel it does. When we are down to the last two apple slices, I blurt out the question.
“Are we best friends?”
Marina stops chewing. She tilts her head to the side, considering my question with all the gravity it requires. She resumes chewing, swallows, and says, “I think we are.”
Blissful relief spills through me. “Me too.”
And so it’s decided. We each raise our last apple slice in the air, a toast to ourselves and each other and the traditions we’ve unknowingly started today. I think we both know, even now, that our toast marks only the beginning of so much more to come.