Greenstead Apple Festival October 2010
Greenstead Apple Festival
An undercurrent of change weaves through the apple festival of our seventeenth year.
Beyond the usual change fall brings—leaves transformed to shades of honey, a flurry of pine cones and acorns at our feet—a truth hangs over Marina and me as we traverse the festival grounds.
The start of our senior year of high school means we don’t know how our lives will look by the time next year’s festival rolls around.
The concept of college looms over us, a reminder that the life we’re used to will soon come to an end.
For the first time, it hits us that the festival is emptier than it’s been in years past. Its attendance likely dwindled little by little over the years, as more people moved away from Greenstead and fewer tourists took interest in visiting.
But we don’t notice it until now. The line at the apple cider booth used to stretch across the aisle, requiring us to carefully sidle through it on our way past. But now it’s just three people deep.
The booths used to extend from one end of the park to the other, offering a bountiful assortment of foods, drinks, jewelry, clothes, artwork, crafts, and more.
Now, the selection seems sparse, with a vast expanse of extra space between the booths.
There’s one booth in particular whose absence we feel the most.
“Lettie’s isn’t here?” Marina asks when we reach the end of the aisle. “Did we miss it?”
“We couldn’t have,” I reply.
We never fail to take note of Lettie’s Confections on our first walk around the festival. Lettie’s smiling face and her table full of caramel apples are a constant. We’ve joked before that everything we do at the festival is just marking time until we’re ready to begin our ritual.
We do another walk down the aisle just in case, but all it does is confirm that Lettie definitely isn’t here this year.
The realization rings a note of unease somewhere in my brain.
Not so much about Lettie herself—we learned at the donut booth that she retired and moved to Florida over the summer—but what she’s come to represent.
We built a tradition around this woman’s caramel apples, and she went and took that tradition to St. Petersburg.
It’s a reminder that change is inevitable, that reality will always win out over rose-colored fantasy.
It’s a reminder that no matter how much Marina and I say nothing will change next year, nothing is certain.
And yet.
Marina and I forge a certainty out of the unknown anyway.
After we’ve had our fill of the festival, we buy a bag of apples from the Mason Farms booth and spend our evening in my kitchen, standing over a hot stove, apprehensively waiting for our homemade caramel to resemble the picture from the recipe on my laptop.
It doesn’t, not completely. It’s a little too thin, sliding off the apples in stubborn resistance.
But that doesn’t stop us from sitting at the kitchen table and dipping apple slices into our runny caramel, one after the other, crunching into sticky sweetness with satisfaction.
Just like that, our tradition continues.
I’m certain, then, that nothing can challenge our friendship. Whatever change the next year brings, we’ll weather it. We’ll adapt. My heart beats with a sentiment that my brain knows is naive but feels too true to deny: This friendship is forever.