Applebutter Making

It still comes back to me occasionally on a fine day in autumn with a nostalgia that is not so much regional homesickness as it is a wish to find some fixed and constant thing in a world whose whole order is changed. I comfort myself that, even now, in some parts of Missouri there is a sound of apple-butter kettles being dragged from lofts, of apple peelers whirring, of tongues clattering while busy fingers cut through Winesaps and Jonathans. A smell of woodsmoke, mingled with cider and cinnamon, fills the air while over it all hangs the haze of Indian summer. And someway, I feel that so long as Missourians are still making apple butter, the world can't be in too bad a shape. "Life Was Simpler Then" Loula Grace Erdman