LAY OF DRIED-APPLE PIE
Sunning themselves on the southern porch,
Where the warm fall rays from the towering
torch
Of the great sun flash in the glowing noons,
The drying apples, in long festoons,
Drink the breath of the crisp fall days,
Borrow the blush of the warming rays;
Storing their sweetness, their rich bouquet,
Against that savage and wintry day
When the housewife’s fingers shall by and by
Mould them into dried-apple pie.
There they mellow and there they brown,
Homely enough to a man from town,
Merely strings of some shrunken fruit,
Swung in the sun. And yet they’re mute
Memory-ticklers to those who know
The ways of the farm in the long-ago:
—The kitchen table, the heaping store
Of round, red apples upon the floor.
The purr of the parer, the mellow snip
As the busy knives thro’ the apples slip.
The merry chatter of boys and girls,
The rosy clutter of paring curls,
As hurrying knives and fingers fly
O ’er the luscious fruit for dried-apple pie.
I’m idly thinking it sure must be
That the rollicking sport of the apple-bee,
—The sweetness of smiles, the touch of the
white
Hands flashing there in the candle-light,—
Must all in a mystic way be blent
In one grand flavor;—that such was lent
To those mellowing strings, those festoons dun
Swinging there in the late fall sun.
For lo, as I look I seem to see
A dream of the past, a fantasy,
—A laughing, black-eyed roguish girl
Whirling a writhing paring curl;
Chanting the words of the old mock spell
That all we children knew so well:
“Three times round and down you go!
Now who is the one that loves me so?”
Merely a fancy, a passing gleam
Of the old, old days;—a sudden dream
Beguiled by some prank of a blurring eye
And the tricking song of a big, blue fly;
—Merely a fancy, and yet, ah me,
How often I’ve wondered where she can be.
There they mellow and there they brown,
Homely objects to folks from town;
Only some apples hung to dry
And doomed to be finally tombed in a pie.