Wendig’s Heirloom Apple Review, 2021

WE HAVE APPLESIGN THE LIKES OF WHICH EVEN GOD HAS NEVER SEEN. Ahem. Sorry. What I mean is, hey! Guess what? It’s that time of the year again. The time of strange, mysterious apples. The era of apples that don’t show up in your grocery store. The epoch of apples that you can only procure from shadowy fruit carts in forgotten alleys that only appear under the light of the harvest moon. Apples that summon scarecrows to steal them. Dread, sinister apples.

To give a little context, for those that somehow have failed to realize my obsession with apples, it’s this: years back I found an orchard at our farmer’s market, North Star Orchard, and they had boxes upon boxes of apples I was sure were a prank. Each sounded like some kind of hobbit bullshit, and I said, “These are all made up, they’re fantasy apples.” But no, as it turns out, they’re entirely real. There are thousands of apple varieties, and you only get like, five or six at your local grocery store. And those apples at your local grocery store have been in storage and transportation for a while. They’re old-ass apples, cultivated so that they stored well and traveled well. Tough, unruly apples, like the Red Delicious — once truly delicious, now only red. The Liar Apple. The Judas Apple.

So, I thought, I’ll take these strange apples home and review them, because that’s what you do on the Internet. You review things. Japanese Kit-Kats, and Odd Spatulas, and Those Teeth You Find In Your Nightstand Drawer. So began #heirloomapplereview, where I did exactly that. Except it’s Twitter, and Twitter kinda sucks, and mostly I feel like I was just starting to annoy people with it. So, I decided it was best to sequester this apple goodness in the ancient puzzle-box that it is the dusty ol’ blog. Remember those? Blogs? Good times.

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