The farm stand is situated just off the side of the road—tucked behind a beautiful old farmhouse with a wraparound porch. The stand itself is a ramshackle wooden building that’s open in the front and on both sides so that people can wander around the tables full of pumpkins and lean down to pick up an apple from the bushel baskets lining the pathway. A strong gust of wind could probably blow the whole thing over, she thinks, but then reconsiders—this very structure has likely withstood the force of generations of Maine winters, weathering the snow and ice with its steadfast, stoic presence.
He pulls over and parks on a grassy patch behind a black pick-up truck and an old blue Volvo whose battered bumper is plastered in stickers: Support Your Local Farmer, Let’s Get Lost, Obey Gravity—It’s The Law!, Maine Beer Co., Nauset Surf Shop.
As they step over the dusty gravel at the edge of the driveway, her hand swings close to his and his knuckles graze hers. Zing. They’ve been together for the past twenty minutes, ever since she met him outside of the campus library where he was finishing up a meeting, and they started off in pursuit of this small adventure. It could have been twenty minutes or twenty hours—he could have been next to her for twenty days straight—and still his hand on hers would produce that same zip of static electricity.
Baskets of apples line one side of the stand, while the front is a full-fledged fall cornucopia: knobby white gourds and striped orange squash and comically oversized pumpkins crowd the slanted shelf and spill over onto burlap-lined crates below. A woman and her teenage son are perusing the pumpkins; he’s in a soccer uniform, his hair sticking sweatily to his forehead and his white shinguards streaked with mud. He looks bored and worn-out, as if he knows that decorative gourd season is his mother’s own competitive sport and he’s too tired to go another round tonight without Gatorade and a plate of lasagna.
Inside the stand are tidy shelves of more produce: onions shedding their papery skins like women shrugging off a coat, bumpy rounds of celeriac and kohlrabi, potatoes and sweet potatoes, greens in every color and size. Someone has labeled each shelf in neat script on a small tag: radicchio, fresh horseradish, Lacinato kale, Savoy cabbage, white cabbage, January King cabbage. Jars of tomato sauce, jams, and jellies are lined up on a high ledge; sunlight streams in through a crack in the boards, making them glow like rubies.
She absentmindedly picks up a jar of pickled beets and turns it in her hands. A chime dings by the cashier; the guy ringing up purchases wears a green wool beanie and a hooded sweatshirt with the farm logo emblazoned on the front. The cuffs are frayed and his boots, peeking out from under his Carhartt pants, are caked with mud. He glances up at her and catches her eye, giving her a wide, crinkly smile.
She blushes and quickly puts back the beets.
The dinged-up scale at the register seems to groan under the weight of their apples: three pounds in total. She picks based on the name: Belle de Boskoop, Maiden’s Blush, Roxbury Russet. He counters by reading the descriptions in a dramatic whisper close to her ear. Sweet-tart with hints of pineapple; popping crisp texture; curiously creamy flavor.
The apples roll around in the bottom of a large paper bag, on top of which they add a jar of local wildflower honey, before a quick debate on what to cook the next night, leading them to add three sweet potatoes, a knob of ginger, and a head of kale. The freezer case in the back corner has piles of vacuum-sealed meat from another farm down the road: ground lamb, sweet pork sausage, and beef steaks.
If they were going straight home, she’d get the ground lamb. At the Co-op, they’d pick up a ball of smoked mozzarella cheese, a bag of frisée, and a couple brioche buns from the bakery—their rounded tops glossy with egg. She would make the burgers, mixing the meat with oregano and fresh mint, then wrapping it around a chunk of the mozzarella. While he grilled them, she would whisk together a spicy sun-dried tomato yogurt to spoon on top, and toss the frisée with torn chervil, parsley, more mint, and a mustardy vinaigrette.
But they aren’t going home and they aren’t cooking until tomorrow night. The sweet potatoes and kale will last until then: There’s a recipe for sweet potato and kale gratin layered with a creamy sauce—bright with minced ginger and topped with a bubbling layer of cheese—in a cookbook in his kitchen, which she can tell he has never once picked up but through which she likes to leaf in the morning while he makes coffee, his hair mussed from sleep and his sweatpants slung low on his hips.
For now, they leave everything in the bag except two of the apples. These apples are beautiful: matte instead of shiny, with tiny leaves still affixed to the stem. They look rustic and wholesome—if placed alongside a shiny grocery store apple, they’d make an ordinary Red Delicious look like a tarted-up harlot, all cheap red lipstick and tight skirt. These apples are the fresh-faced, freckled, girl-next-door variety.
He carries the bag to the car and arranges it in the back next to a folded blanket, two squash racquets, and a rumpled Patagonia fleece. The car is warm from sitting in the weak November sun and they roll the windows down as they start to drive. Van Morrison is singing Tupelo Honey on the radio and she turns it up, then hits her seat heater, which makes him laugh. “I like to be toasty!” she sings out, and she does.
After a few miles, the asphalt turns to dirt, with deep ruts along the sides. This is the scenic route: a twisting, winding road that takes them past fields of black-and-white Holstein cows, their heads all bent in the communal prayer of chewing, and saltbox houses and stands of evergreens that sway invitingly in the hushed evening air, whispering of shaded trails and deep forest and pine-scented ocean air.
One of her college professors—a solidly round gray-haired writer who wore a uniform of rumpled khakis, a herringbone jacket, and a Muir Woods baseball hat—was forever reinforcing the concept of focusing on small moments. His class was Environmental Non-Fiction 305; his field of study was wilderness landscapes. “Attention to the smallest detail!” he would rumble at them, gesticulating with a sheaf of papers or a chewed-up ballpoint pen. “Life is in the threads, not the entire fabric!”
The words occur to her at odd intervals for years after: Now, in the car, with him. She notices. Notices the patchy fur on a cow’s back, the way another flicks its tail at the black flies dotting its legs. Notices the scratchy dip in Van Morrison’s voice when he sings about tea in China. Notices how the smell of woodsmoke and something sweet—apple cider?—hangs in the air as they cross beneath Route 1 and curve towards the water.
She supposes that she has always noticed more than other people—places seem to become entrenched in her being easily, even when she was young. They felt like characters to her, as alive as her siblings, and as formative. If she asked her sister to describe their Christmas vacations, she would have shrugged and said, “The beach? Palm trees.”
Details didn’t imprint themselves on other people the same way. She would have talked about the rough feeling of coconut husks against her palms, and the lurid pink of the rum punch her parents drank at sunset on the wraparound porch of their villa. There was the sticky-sweet taste of barbecued chicken from the lunchtime grill-outs on the crushed shell driveway near the main restaurant, and the damp sensation of her bathing suit after hours paddling a kayak around the mangrove swamps.
She couldn’t not notice, but it hadn’t occurred to her until she began to learn to write—in earnest, as a vocation—in college that this was a habit some people had to learn, not the way that their mind trapped and recorded moments.
And yet, meeting him has even further heightened her natural inclination for detail, like she’s a radio finely tuned to receive any minute vibration. The world is so much more saturated—practically overly vivid—with him in it.
They’re driving down a long driveway now, and she’s sure she’s never been here. He parks in an empty lot and they climb out; from the backseat he picks up the folded blanket, the fleece, and tucks something into his pocket that she can’t see quickly enough.
Following him down a path, she sees that they’re at some kind of farm—or preservation. Huge expanses of neatly mown grassy fields are bordered by split-rail fences, and the fields are dotted here and there with massive oak trees and small white benches, as if beckoning visitors to sit and watch the glimmer of the Harraseeket River beyond as it leads placidly out to Casco Bay.
She doesn’t ask where they are—he is always offering up pocket expeditions to her, and she accepts them gladly, filing each hour or afternoon or evening away in a mental catalog that she reaches for as she falls asleep, or rides the T, or waits in line at the post office.
They walk to the middle of the biggest field where the grass is less thick. Some areas look trodden and soft, as if people have been merrily picnicking there for weeks. He flips the blanket overhead, the breeze catching it underneath so it crests in the air for a brief moment like a kite, then arranges it carefully on the ground. There’s enough space for at least six people, but she scoots over and sits so that their knees touch.
In the far-off distance, seagulls are calling their low, mournful squawks and a faint clanking comes every few minutes: halyards sounding their metallic chime against the mast of sailboats in the harbor, lobstermen hauling watery traps over the transom.
Squinting, she can see a dog racing across the far edge of the meadow along the treeline, bounding back and forth between some invisible tennis ball and his owner: a tall weathered-looking woman who comes striding into sight wearing striped overalls and a cheerful smile, a cascade of bright silver hair pooling around her shoulders. “Don’t mind him!” she calls loudly. “He considers picnic blankets an invitation!”
She takes a bite of her apple, which is as tart and sweet as promised. From his pocket, he pulls a small water bottle, which must have been what he grabbed from the backseat just before they set out. The first sip is unexpected: citrusy and bright with the shimmering pop of sparkling water. She raises her eyebrows at him.
“Apple G&T,” he says. “It’s a regular G&T but there’s apple cider and lemon juice and a splash of ginger beer in there too.”
“Fancy!” she says admiringly, and it really might be one of the better cocktails she’s ever had—and G&Ts top her list of favorites.. Three years ago, she and her friend Astrid had spent a long weekend in Paris. Astrid is a consultant, a job which still remains a tiny bit unclear but requires her to fly to all manner of far-flung locales, where she never sees anything but the inside of a taxi, a hotel room, and a conference room, in that order. While on an assignment for a major beverage company in Vienna, Astrid wheedled her way into getting three days off before flying home, and arranged for the Paris trip.
She had flown to meet her along with three other college friends: one in graduate school at Oxford, one working at a graphic design firm in Madrid, and one in New York who flew over on the same British Airways flight. On their final night out, they ate dinner at a tiny bistro in the 6th arrondissement and stumbled into a bar called Tiger on their walk home, which turned out to be a gem of a spot specializing in adorably scruffy French men and gin. They had sampled G&Ts made with pineapple and spicy cinnamon, ones with peppery shiso and radish, with freshly squeezed peach juice and lime. She’d thought she would have to travel back to Paris, to that exact spot, to try another quite as good. But this one tonight—a bracingly cold, sweet cider G&T—is the best.
They pass the bottle back and forth, alternating between sips and bites of her apple and a box of miniature Stoned Wheat Thins that somehow materialized, as if out of thin air. He is, in short, a very good adventure planner.
Conversation between them swings like a well-oiled pendulum from the weighty to the light and back again. It always has.
“Favorite cookie?” she asks through a mouthful of apple. He hmms, pulling a serious face, and takes a minute to deliberate. “Milano. No, no, wait. Not my final answer. The fudge stripe ones. No! Hang on. Girl Scout cookies, of course. Toss-up between a Thin Mint and the coconutty ones. Final answer.”
“Interesting choice,” she nods. “Points for all, except aren’t Thin Mints a tiny bit overrated? Let’s discuss the real unsung hero of the cookie aisle: the pecan sandie.” Here, she pauses to rearrange herself against his chest, his body warm and solid beneath his blue flannel shirt.
She snaps her fingers. “That’s what we’ll make! The pecan apple cake!” He looks at her blankly, so she explains. Her grandparents used to keep sleeves of the cookies in their kitchen: They remain one of the distinctive taste memories of that phase of growing up, along with peanut butter and fluff sandwiches and the Andes mints they’d steal from the bowl outside the country club dining room’s hostess stand.
Last year she made an apple cake that tasted precisely like a pecan sandie on top: a bite so specific in flavor that it was puzzling how she could have landed on it without trying. The base of the cake, she describes, is a simple yellow cake with almond extract and rum, topped with apple slices and a very thick layer of pecan streusel.
“Tomorrow night,” she murmurs, her head now resting right in the crook between his shoulder and jaw, “we’ll have it after dinner so put heavy cream on the list.”
And it is here that they sit as the light fades and turns dusky, and one bright star appears in the velvet fabric of the sky.
Apple Pear Streusel Cake
Makes one 9” cake
For the streusel
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup finely chopped pecans
1/4 cup rolled oats
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold
For the cake
3 medium apples or pears or a combination
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 eggs
3 tablespoons yogurt or sour cream
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 tablespoon rum or bourbon (optional)
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9” springform pan—you can also use a 9” round cake pan or high-sided tart pan.
Place all of the streusel ingredients into a bowl and rub the butter into them with your fingertips until the mixture is well-mixed and sandy. There shouldn’t be any large chunks of butter visible. Refrigerate while you make the batter.
Peel and thinly slice the fruit.
Cream together the sugar and butter, then add the eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl as you go and beating until the mixture looks pale and fluffy.
Beat in the sour cream and almond extract, then the rum or bourbon (if using).
Add the flour, baking powder, and salt—mix just until the batter comes together and looks smooth.
Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top as best you can.
Place the sliced fruit on top of the batter, trying to overlap the slices as tightly as possible so there aren’t too many gaps. I usually press down lightly on the fruit once it’s all in place to further eliminate gaps.
Sprinkle the streusel over the top and then bake for 45 to 55 minutes, or until the streusel is golden brown and the fruit is juicy.