When life gives you apples ... be grateful and make some apple pie

My next-door neighbor's apple tree has an abundance of apples this year. This little apple tree is dwarfed by the gargantuan silver maple on the edge of my property. The two trees somehow also share the narrow space between our 70s-built ranch homes with a scraggly ponderosa pine and a bushy blue spruce.

In normal years, this little apple tree produces a modest yield of somewhat wormy apples the size of ping pong balls. I usually leave them to the squirrels.

But this year, the tree is laden with a crop of the most beautiful golden-green apples - their white flesh is worm-free and delicious. And there are so many apples that I haven't even had to fight the squirrels for a fair share. These same squirrels are looking particularly plump, and I have a good laugh at their antics around my yard which are decidedly less nimble than usual and leave them winded.

I mention this abundance of apples because it has me thinking about something else seasonal (besides apple pie) - gratitude.

By all reports and by my own observations of both the trees and the boxes at the ends of driveways marked "free apples," it was a banner year for our fruit trees. Perhaps we got that near impossible perfect combination of warm weather and no early frost – not to mention the unusually long and mild fall. Either way, the apple trees produced like I've never seen before in my decade of living in Niwot. Anyone with an apple tree had an abundance of apples.

I've often heard it said that it's easy to be grateful when things are going well or when you're living with an abundance. I think this is true when we are talking about life's necessities. But once you've got the basics (food, water, shelter, clothing, etc. a la Maslov's hierarchy) covered, does having an abundance automatically trigger gratitude?

I don't think it's that simple. And in the last year, we've had an abundance of a different sort - an abundance of challenges living in the midst of a global pandemic. And we can't help but notice this abundance because it forced its way in on us. Like the abundance of leaves in my yard from that aforementioned ginormous silver maple, this abundance was the negative kind that we had to deal with.

This leads me back to the apple tree in my neighbor's yard. It would have been easy to overlook it this fall. I was so busy raking leaves and cursing the squirrels for the half-eaten apples in my gutters that I could have easily missed the good for all the detritus.

Then one afternoon I noticed my neighbor had put out a small green container on their lawn and had collected a bunch of what looked like actually edible, tennis-ball-size apples. Their little apple tree leans two branches over our fence, so I slowed down that day and decided to actually look. And I am grateful that I did because that afternoon I picked about 12 pounds of apples from those two branches dangling over my yard.

So what exactly is the point of this ramble about my neighbor's apple tree? I think being grateful has a lot more to do with noticing than it does with either abundance or scarcity. And this Thanksgiving, I'll be taking a bit more time to slow down, look around, and really observe what I have to be grateful for. That and making some apple pie.

My Favorite Apple Pie Recipe