When Life Gives You Apples...

We made apple cider yesterday. We made it the old-fashioned way, using a hard press cider mill, after we collected wheelbarrows full of apples. Every apple -- mottled, dented, even slightly bruised -- was collected. We shook apples from the boughs and picked them up off the ground. We must have collected thousands of them! And we hauled them back to our host's driveway, the owner of the apple trees and the cider mill, a sweet and gracious woman who invited us to collect all of the apples we wanted -- for free! -- and who welcomed us to use her ladders and wheelbarrows and, most importantly, her cider machine.

Making cider is hard work. It takes a lot of apples (we should have counted, but hundreds were involved. Trust me.) to produce a gallon of apple cider. It takes all kinds of apples -- a mixture of tart green Granny Smiths and sweet State Fair, and yellow Golden Delicious -- to make a good-tasting cider. We loaded apples and cranked the wheel to mash them up. We watched the bucket below as it filled with apple cores and stems and pulp and when it was full, we moved it to the press. We hand cranked that thing and pressed down hard and watched as the sweet-smelling amber liquid rushed like a mini waterfall through the open slats of the bucket and dripped into the waiting container below. We took that container and funneled it through a sieve, into our empty containers, filling them to the brim with frothy, foamy, apple cider. And we tasted it, the hard fruits of our labor, the sweetest cider on earth. It was delicious. Divine. Like nectar, the drink of the gods.

After three hours of hard, strenuous work, we came home two gallons richer. I stowed them in the refrigerator and started making dinner. I was physically drained but I felt more alive -- renewed, refreshed -- than I had in a long time.

Because, you see, that afternoon I learned much more than how to make apple cider. I learned that life is a lot like apple cider. You need all different kinds of experiences -- the sweet, the sour and all the flavors in between -- to make a rich life. You don't focus on simply collecting the best experiences, the shiniest ones, the most perfect ones; you collect them all, bumpy, bruised, as ugly as they may be, because all of them are valuable and necessary. All of them are required to make a rich and vibrant life. Just like apple cider.

The past few weeks have been tough. They have been filled with an influx of emotions -- happiness, regret, remorse -- and I am finally at peace with all of them. I welcome them. I embrace all that I am and all that I have experienced because these are the things that make up me. It is my own personal recipe, a blended mixture that, I think, is a pretty sweet brew.

Everyone knows the saying, When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

I've got a new one: When life gives you apples -- all kinds of apples -- make apple cider.

I'm glad I did.