These pictures and words are from our first Apple Day, in 2015. Since then, Apple Day each year has continued each year in the same wonderful tradition: many apples, eager children, much work, wonderful people, and an enormous amount of apple cider, apple butter, and apple pie to go around.
Community. In our increasingly fragmented, distracted society, its a word that is coming back in vogue. And it is something that I have thought about quite a bit. What does community in our modern age even look like? Is it Mayberry, Leave it to Beaver, or some sort of Amish barn raising? One thing I’ve found is that it is easy to idealize community, to the point where it is an unattainable concept.
But that’s not what this post is about. See, I’ve realized that I can mourn over our society’s increasing fragmentation and philosophize all day about the positive aspects of living in a community, be it economically/spiritually/emotionally, but that won’t do a thing about whether or not I am actually a member of a community. Wendell Berry said it best (as usual):
“Community, I am beginning to understand, is made through a skill I have never learned or valued: the ability to pass time with people you do not and will not know well, talking about nothing in particular, with no end in mind, just to build trust, just to be sure of each other, just to be neighborly. A community is not something that you have, like a camcorder or a breakfast nook. No, it is something you do. And you have to do it all the time.”
