Autumn and apple-picking

Isn’t fall weather gorgeous? I love the cold, clear mornings, the skies so blue and hard it seems they would shatter if you threw a stone high enough. Of course, here in Virginia it’s nothing like as beautiful as New York. The turning of the leaves is lovely here, too, but . . . it just doesn’t compare.

Every year for the past three I’ve sorely missed what has become a tradition in my family: going apple-picking at a nearby tree farm (often the same one where we find our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving—another tradition). There’s really nothing like a freshly-picked apple, juicy, just the slightest bit tart, and crisp as a fall morning.

Last year I had a roommate from Massachusetts whose parents came to visit, bringing apples, pies, and fresh cider. It was all lovely and delicious, but in some ways it just made things worse—a painful reminder that my family was apple-picking and pie-baking, and I was going to miss out for yet another year.

Still, I’d take a sharp reminder in a second, if I could have one of those apples right now. After all, the memories are there anyway...

On blogging

Since I’ve finally broken down and gotten a blog (at least it’s not a myspace account!) it’s occurred to me to wonder why they’re so popular. Why do so many people need blogs?

Why do I need one?

In the movie Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis (among others) says, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Perhaps we write for the same reason. We can’t really ever know anyone the way they know themselves. And no one can ever truly know us. But in writing we can connect a little, find a little mutual understanding.

Maybe we write in order to see, in a world where we’re too often driving blind. We throw our thoughts and feelings out into the world—and the Web—as a kind of echolocation, and we steer through life’s uncertainties by the responses we get.

Or maybe we write because it’s just plain cathartic. Even if no one else will ever see what we write, letting it all out is a kind of release, one that we sorely need sometimes.

Maybe it’s all these things. Or maybe none. It could be that all this is nothing more than words lined up in rows.

But if I believed that, I wouldn't be blogging.