Apple Picking Days

If, at the end of summer, you were young and strong, could spare a few weeks away from home and were in need of cash money, you signed up to pick apples in New England.  It was hard work but the air was clean, the leaves were turning, the ocean wasn't that far away and the money was good.   The orchards of Londonderry and Exeter and Lee welcomed the young Canadians with open arms.

Apple picking was a six day a week, dawn to dusk affair but on Sundays, the young men piled into borrowed, dusty pick up trucks and drove to my parents' where they gathered on the deck.  They drank astonishing quantities of cold beer and consumed fried chicken and potato salad and told tales.  The ones that were homesick called home, all were grateful for a day off and my mother was pleased to have them.  In return for the day's hospitality, they would help out my daddy with small projects around the house, cut and stack wood, rake leaves.  Often one would bring a guitar and music floated out over the lake well after dark.  These were good days with laughter and conversation, days that felt like going home.  It always made me melancholy to see them end - it was like leaving the island all over again - and it didn't comfort me to know that there would be another summer, there was too much cold and winter in between.
  
Often, if not always, I felt divided as a child, torn between the life I lived in the summer and the one I lived the rest of the year, never quite sure to which I belonged.  Much like my two families - my mother's on the one hand and my daddy's on the other - I wavered and changed sides, searching for a balance that was always just out of reach.  During the long winters I would yearn for the island and feel guilty, during the too short summers
I would remember I had another life and feel guilty.  It was one metaphor after another - the conflict between the seasons, the war between my parents, the never to be reconciled differences between the families, the
distance that separated the country and city life.  Belonging seemed to be a continuing tug of war.

Eventually I managed a mostly tolerable compromise - I settled and stayed in the States but left my heart in Canada.  It's still there to this very day even though the rest if me isn't.