DATE: Tuesday, November 4, 1997             TAG: 9711040037

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Elizabeth Simpson

                                            LENGTH:   60 lines

APPLE PICKING IS A RUTUAL PLUCKED FROM FAMILY TREE

THE POCKED, lopsided apples on my kitchen counter would not be here if my father hadn't called. He phoned from Missouri a few weeks ago, saying he and my Aunt Mary Frances were going apple picking the next day.

And it occurred to me that something had been missing from fall this year. Something that had been as steady as the harvest moon in the autumn dusk of my childhood.

I had not picked apples this year.

Nor had my children. We had just picked through the tough-skinned, perfect-looking apples in the grocery store bin.

And so the next Saturday, we went to Martin's Orchard on Knotts Island. We breathed in the smell of apples sweetly going brown on the orchard ground, listened to the buzz of bees as they drifted from one tree to the next, marveled at the clear blue skies through the gnarled branches of apple trees.

And we picked apples. Lots of 'em. The bruised, the pocked, the ripe and the not-so-ripe.

Fall and winter, starting with Halloween and finishing with our annual self-timed family photograph on New Year's Eve, is a time of ritual. The season when we do things as we have always done them, when we hearken back to our childhoods for the things that formed the backbone of our lives.

Doesn't matter if what we remember are the bee stings and tired feet and the apples that were less than perfect. Doesn't matter if we don't like cider, or if it suddenly occurs to us that the apple pie recipe we always use is kind of watery.

What's important is that it's fall and that we must go to the orchard to pick apples.

In summer, our family tries new things, explores new places. We look outside ourselves and our lives for adventure. But when the time changes and the weather turns, we draw back in and look for things we have always done: pumpkin carving, Thanksgiving pie cooking, gingerbread house making.

In a world of uncertainty, in an era of dizzying change, the repetition of the familiar is a comforting cadence. The predictability, more than the success of the event, is the reason for doing it. If we skip something, forget an annual event like a play or a hay ride or a holiday festival, my children remind me, ``This isn't how we did it last year.''

The rituals are my children's security blanket, and we dare not alter them, except to add a few threads here and there. Additions are fine; subtractions are not. Which may have something to do with the time crunch we are constantly up against.

As an adult, I have already gone through the stage where I tried to be everything my parents were not. I moved to the city after growing up in a small town. Live on the East Coast after spending my childhood in the Midwest. Work for a living after being raised by a stay-at-home mother.

But lately I am more intent on finding the similarities of my family and my past, trying to strike the same tone, create the rhythms of my childhood for my own kids.

The Christmas cookie cutters I buy are identical to the ones I used as a child. I make quesadillas if I've had a tough day, because that's what my mother made. I use the same apple pie recipe from the same battered red-and-white cookbook that was in my childhood home.

And, in fall, I go to the orchard.

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