City Boy, Country Girl

When my husband and I first married, we lived in Milton Keynes, England. I was from Langley, B.C., and he was from London, an hour's drive south of MK.

We lived in a little brick house in an estate near a small wood. By the side of the road running past this wood, grew one solitary scraggly apple tree.

I'm pretty sure no-one else noticed this pathetic thing growing in a ditch. But I knew when I first saw it blossom in the spring that it was an apple tree, and I kept my eye on it over the summer, waiting for the apples to grow.

One day in late summer, after seeing the apples were ripe, I left the house with a bucket and went to harvest the wild fruit. I came home with enough apples to make a good sized crumble, which I lovingly prepared from scratch.

I proudly presented my finished dish to my husband, telling him that I had picked the apples myself.

'I'm not eating that!' He declared. 'You don't eat apples from a tree!'

'Really?' I replied, rather shocked. 'Where do you get apples from then?'

'From a shop.'

He stuck to his principles and never did try my crumble (which I had no difficulty eating all by myself). But since then it has been a favourite joke.

Now we live in rural B.C., where many people do eat produce that doesn't come from a shop. I'll never forget when my husband returned from a walk with friends, who had introduced him to wild Saskatoon berries. He told me that he had tasted them.

'What, you ate berries from a bush and not from a shop?' I cried in mock astonishment.

In our new backyard we have one small, lonely apple tree. Maybe next summer I'll try making a crumble again...