table of contents
Apple Stealing
Reminiscence of a Minnesota Childhood
Some of my happiest memories as a child are rooted in that time of year when Minnesota apples ripen on the tree. The promise of fruit, pies and sauce motivated me to labor hard in our family’s apple orchard and to reap my sweet, and sometimes wonderfully tart, reward. Even better, I thoroughly enjoyed the annual intrigue of spying for “apple stealers.”
I was raised in Eagan, Minnesota on land that was homesteaded by my Irish great-grandparents in 1856, before Minnesota was a state. Each generation since inherited adjoining acreage, so by the time I was a child, we were completely surrounded by our relatives. In the seventies, my brother Martin and later along his wife, Atina developed the Gardens of Eagan, a certified organic farm on the Diffley homestead.
Our apple orchard was planted in a valley across and down the road about half a mile from our home, which sat high on a hill overlooking a valley to the north. We had this sprawling view from our upstairs bathroom window, and to me it was magnificent. There was the rolling horse pasture, the brilliant sumac, a tiny neighborhood settlement of homes my father had built and a grand winding bend in the highway that disappeared around an enormous hill covered with oaks and poplars. From that window, I relished the notion that I stood at a height equal to the oak hill a mile away.
Each year as fall approached, apples became the center of our existence. Every family member pitched in to harvest the apples. Sorting little crab apples was a seemingly endless task, but it was my contribution to the jelly that graced our cupboard, made a fine gift to friends and neighbors and was a welcome addition to the parochial school hot lunch program.
During late summer weeks, we ate our meals around a strange bulging muslin bag hung from a metal rack that contained sweet steaming apple mush. Drip by drip, the intensely colored liquid would drop into a canning kettle for the next batch of prized jelly. My resourceful mother was always sure to point out that our crab apples contained enough natural pectin to gel immediately- no Sure Gel was needed in her kitchen.
For our family, keeping a lookout for “apple stealers” was another ritual during the harvest days of late August and September. This strange yet exciting responsibility was doled out to all five of us Diffley children. We were given strict instruction from our mom and dad: when you use the upstairs bathroom, pick up the binoculars on the windowsill and check the north road above the orchard for any parked cars.
One Sunday afternoon when I was ten and my sister Eileen was eight, I spied from my perch in the bathroom a newish car parked above the orchard. My heart began to pound, as I knew the car most likely had transported apple stealer to our orchard. I ran downstairs to inform my dad, who sat reading the newspaper. After sounding the alert, I jumped into the back seat of the Ford and, along with my sister Eileen, cranked down the windows. We eagerly waited for dad to get the car moving and investigate the situation.
I anticipated my dad’s righteous defense of our hard-earned apples with the familiar twinge of terror and delight. Dad was a generous man, but he believed in doing things right. In his mind, if a body needed apples, then a body needed to ask or pay before taking what belonged to another.
Dad took his sweet time coming out of the house, moving at a pace more appropriate to a Sunday afternoon stroll. When we finally were off, he drove slowly down the road, coming to a crawl as he pulled onto the shoulder directly behind the new sedan.
Eileen and I shifted to the far right of the back seat in one complete motion and stared out the window together. Down in the orchard, a young couple with a toddler picked Haralsons from the tree closest to the road. We’d never seen a family of apple stealers before. We judged they had been at it for some time, since they had completely filled a large bushel basket. Unaware of our presence, the pilferers stood with their backs to us, dropping apples into a grocery bag at their feet.
Dad jotted down the car’s license plate. Then he turned to Eileen and me and said very seriously, “Stay in the car and watch.”
Slowly dad opened the car door, stood up and walked around to the back of our car. He surveyed the orchard and the intruders, then turned and opened our car’s trunk, removing nothing from it. From the top of the orchard he hollered to the couple, “How are the apples?”
The couple was obviously startled. After a moment’s hesitation, the woman replied, “They look pretty good.”
Dad stood still several minutes more, then started down the grassy bank, snapping off tall heads of grass as he approached the brazen trespassers. My heart beat raced fast.
Glued to the window, Eileen and I strained to hear dad’s next question. “Whose apples are these?” he asked, point blank.
The couple was slow to respond. Then the man spoke. “I guess they’re growing wild.” The woman piped in, “Probably railroad property.” She nervously pointed to the train tracks on the upper ridge to the east.
Dad’s reply came booming up the hill to where Eileen and I sat listening, “You’re standing on my property and picking apples that I planted for my family. You’re trespassing, and it’s time to leave.” With complete authority, dad walked over to the full bushel basket and picked it up by the handles. Immediately the woman dropped the apple she was holding into the grocery bag and picked up the paper sack. The man gathered up the toddler. Without another word, dad led a silent procession up the hill to the cars.
As the parties approached the shoulder of the road, Eileen and I left our post and slumped together. I held my breath. I felt a flush of embarrassment for the couple. Dad reached our car first. The trunk heaved as he placed the filled bushel basket in our trunk. He shut the trunk with one swift slap.
The woman stood in shock. “Well aren’t you going to give me my bushel basket back? It’s my best laundry basket!”
Dad’s response was immediate, and practical, “And take a chance of damaging my apples? No, ma’am. You have enough apples in that bag for your family to enjoy for the entire week. Take them and don’t return.”
As the family walked by the side of the car, Eileen and I slid to the floor of the back seat, both of us smothering giggles and expecting an explosion of some sort. When dad was back in our car and we heard car doors bang shut, we popped up and leaned over the front seat. From the safety of their car, the couple turned to face us one last time.
When their car was well around the bend, dad started the engine and drove home. Eileen and I laughed and bounced up and down in our seats all the way, still giddy from dad’s show of might. I secretly enjoyed the thought that the couple’s thievery had saved us the work of picking one more bushel of apples. As he drove, dad rehashed the confrontation, saying in disbelief, “Imagine that, they guessed the trees were just growing wild or on railroad property.” I could tell he was glad to have set them straight.
After we got home and tumbled out of the car, dad didn’t let the matter drop completely. He called the Division of Motor Vehicles to inquire about the trespassing car. In that decade, that office would find out the name of the person and their address if you called in a license number. He started inquiring about the apple stealers. Turns out the apple stealers were a pediatrician and his family who moseyed over from a growing nearby suburb, Mendota Heights. It’s not that we thought their intentions had been dishonest, but we all agreed the doc and his family had assumed too much when they stopped at our orchard to pick apples.
That particular incident of catching apple stealers “red handed” sticks in my mind, but there were many others that came before and after that particular day. Eileen and I faithfully kept watch over the orchard road and regularly helped dad roust intruders. We felt justified; after all, these people were literally poaching the fruits of our labors. Through our orchard policing we learned about hard work, ownership, and common courtesy.
In this season of my life, my mind easily wanders back to the days of catching apple stealers. Whenever I bite into the juicy crunch of a crisp Haralson apple, I smile at the thought of the old adage, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
Coveting Angel Hair
Iattended a Catholic grade school from first to eight grade in Rosemount, Minnesota. St. Joseph’s parochial Catholic School was about sixty feet away from the parish church. During Advent there was a large nativity set in the front left transept wing of the church. I was in awe with its beauty and size. It had well painted statues from the nativity story. The eerie blue lights in the background created a twilight or moonlight ambience to the creche scene that mesmerized me. On the floor of the stable were sparkling swirls of white angel hair that gave the appearance of snow. I greatly desired some of that angel hair for our cardboard nativity set in my home.
During an outdoor recess, while in second grade, I snuck into the empty church through the back door that had a small gothic shaped window. Besides my footsteps, the only other sound came from the hissing radiators. As I stood under the stable at eye level to the baby Jesus in the manger, I grabbed a handful of angel hair and placed it in my mitten. I was wearing my black and white skunk mittens knitted by my Aunt Mary. They were cute mittens with buttons for eyes. As I walked out the back door of the church, my hand became itchy and began to sweat. The itchiness became so intense, that I ran into the school’s restroom and washed it several times. I suspected it was the angel hair causing the problem but could not understand why it would be so nasty to the touch. I threw the angel hair away into the trash can and covered it with brown paper towels. The itchiness continued so I spent the remainder of the recess dealing with my red itchy hand.
As I got ready to catch the school bus home on that December day, I discovered one of mittens was making my hand itchy, so I stuck the mitten in my coat pocket. I felt I had to tell my mother something about the mitten’s new problem. When I got home I told her that the mitten became very itchy to my hand after I petted the angel hair in the church’s nativity set. My mom said at once, that angel hair contains something called, fiberglass. It is very soft and pretty but can make people’s skin very itchy. After several laundry attempts to rid the mitten of the fiberglass, she announced that she was going to have to throw the infected mitten away.
I was a young adult before I told her that I had stolen the angel hair. My attempt to steal doll clothes from my cousin, did not work out when I was five years old, and my attempt to steal the angel hair also back fired. Both thefts brought problems into my life. So at eight years old, I assumed stealing would bring immediate consequences… at least for me.
The Summer I Accidentally Killed
My Boss’s Cat
In the summer of 1967, I was sixteen-years-old and had two goals. I planned to earn more money than any previous summer. I also was going to use my earnings to fly for the first time ever to the Rockies and visit my older brother (who was a Latin teacher) and his wife both living in Longmont Colorado.
I became the only maid for a ten-unit motel in Mendota Heights, Minnesota where I worked six days a week. It was directly across from my dad’s barber shop. I figured that my years of experience cleaning my parents’ rental properties qualified me as a thorough house cleaner. I was very surprised to find out that my standard for cleaning did not meet my boss’s expectations. I was determined to hang onto that job, so I rose to the challenge of daily looking under beds for dust bunnies and inspecting the newly cleaned bathrooms for a single fallen hair.
I soon discovered that clean motel rooms do not stay clean. By the following morning, I was often breathing the stale smell of cigarette smoke, mopping up spilled beer, and standing ankle deep in junk food wrappers. Twice I blushed with embarrassment in front of my boss after I dropped full cans of Windex on the sidewalk. The dropped cans sprayed out all of their contents while spinning around like swatted hornets. I recall that working all alone was also challenging for a sociable teen.
After a tiring day of work, I was backing out of the motel’s parking lot, when I accidentally ran over my boss’s playful Siamese cat. A sickening feeling overcame me as I looked down at the poor injured cat. I sensed my job as a motel maid had just gotten worse. As I drove the lifeless cat, draped over a Spruce Motel towel, lying on my boss’s lap to the pet hospital, despair gripped me. Now I had really done it. I had critically injured her sweet cat, and my summer savings for my trip to the Rockies would most likely have to be spent on the cost to the small animal hospital.
The poor little cat did not make it. I apologized sincerely and wrote a sympathy note to my boss. She was understanding, and said that if I had not been the one, her quick escape artist of a cat, might have been hit by one of her many motel customers. At that moment, I wished it had been one of them. Since that summer, I remember to tip housekeeping when I stay in a hotel. I have to admit that no job since has been as difficult as that one was.