The farmers have  reasons and myths and stories to account for everything, farm life is so difficult and unpredictable, they need to find ways to account for the unaccountable. We are drowning in apples. Apples are dropping where I have never seen apples before, not in my 15 years of living on a farm.

The farmers say a plentiful apple crop is a sure sign of a tough winter – this is Mother Nature’s way of making sure the animals outdoors have enough to eat. The biologists say most apple trees produce a crop every other year or so. Still, nobody can account for the enormous numbers of apples popping up everywhere.

I am sorry Johnny Appleseed is not around to see it. Even Maria has turned domestic, she is collecting some apples and making pot after pot of applesauce, which we are eating daily. She has spent hours collecting the apples in baskets and tossing them into the woods so Chloe will not eat too many.

It is a hopeless quest, there are apples everywhere we look, even in places where we had no idea there were apple trees. And we are hearing this from everyone we know. We can’t walk into the back  yard without crunching apples, it is mess to mow the lawn, the donkeys line up by the gate, pawing the ground to get ate them, meanwhile they are eating scores of apples falling out of the tree in the pasture.

Something is different. But nobody knows what. I was thinking today of the sudden disappearance 100 years ago of the carrier pigeons, once the most populous bird in North America. They all began to die suddenly about a century ago, the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Maybe 2015 will be known as the year of the great apple invasion, when the earth began to be covered in apples, and the deer took over the earth.