Seattle 144, or Cider House

When I got the invitation, I almost squealed out loud. A cider pressing, in the next neighborhood over, at the brightly painted co-op. Bring your apples - your bruised, your half-eaten, your yearning to be crushed and poured and savored. E had a rickety old press, borrowed from yet another co-op, which featured a PVC pipe for a crank and so little glue we sometimes held it together with our knees.

When I arrived, groaning bag slung over my back, I found the beginnings of an assembly line. I slipped in to share a cutting board, grabbed a knife from the wall, followed the labeled cabinets to a towel and colander, washed my apples and joined the group. A child sat at the table, doing math problems. Her mother sat next to her, knife in hand, talking and tossing cores into a bowl. We chopped until we filled the stock pot - big enough to bathe in, it came nearly to my hip.

Dinner materialized when it got dark - the long kitchen table slowly moved from apples to potluck - beet salad and fresh bread, my sundried tomato-walnut pesto over pasta, ghost-shaped cookies, banana muffins. The house was full, and noisy, everything spilling over. I took a break from the press, prowled the common rooms of the house, let the surroundings tickle me: a bathroom sink, disconnected from its pipes so the water dropped straight into a bucket to be used for flushing the toilet. A labeled cabinet by the front door reading "extra blankets." Copies of letters written to company heads and political figures. The hall table with the blank name tags and jar full of markers, with specific instructions to include one's preferred pronoun. The hall telephone with the sticker "this phone has been tapped by order of the US Patriot Act." The jerryrigged feat of a kitchen.

It turned out that only E and I knew how to use the press - how to dump the chopped apples into the hopper, grind them down and then use the wooden paddle, the giant screw, and the apples' own weight to press until juice ran in sweet, thin rivulets into the bucket. Each cycle took about twenty minutes from start to finish. I remembered the cider party at Red Truck, the honey harvests from my childhood, Apple Days when visiting Marlboro. This party had the same harvest joy, the sticky hands of plenty.

After three nonstop hours of pressing, we had about five gallons - not counting the stuff we'd drunk in celebration or sent home with people. Most of it went into the basement - E wanted to experiment with fermenting it. I walked home with a mason jar of cider cradled in my sweater, sweet, grimy fingers, delight at seeing my breath. Autumn, indeed. Who needs foliage when there's cider and early sunsets?