The Sweet Press of October

October opens with a white dawn in the orchard. The grass crackles underfoot and the last of the apples hang heavy on the boughs, their color deepened by a week of cold nights. Frost does something to fruit that sunshine never manages. It pushes the sugars, firms the flesh, finishes the crop.

By mid-morning the ladders are up. The pickers move through the trees in pairs, one filling a canvas bag, one easing fruit into a wooden bin. These are the late varieties, the ones that needed the whole summer and then some — McIntosh and Cortland for eating, Baldwin and Northern Spy for pies and sauce. The Spy is a stubborn apple; it hangs on past the leaves, and a good October is the only month that ever meets it.

The trees that held their leaves into late September have given them up; the ground is a welter of red and gold and windfall apples, and the bees that worked the orchard all summer are gone, replaced by the quiet business of the crew.

The crew works fast because the light is getting short. Every orchard in the county is picking at once, and the forecast says rain before the weekend. There is a hum of ladders shifting, of canvas against bark, of apples dropping into bins with a sound like stones settling in a creek.

Somewhere near the barn the press shed fills with the smell of cold fruit and wet boards. The air turns sweet there, the way it turns sweet in a sugarhouse. October has its own version of that warmth, but it comes from apples and not from fire — though there will be fire before the day is done.

The work of the press

The old way had a horse walking in a circle, turning a wheel that ground the apples to pulp. Most places have traded the horse for a motor, but the afternoon is the same. The apples are washed in a trough, then fed into a grinder that chews them — skins, cores, seeds, all of it — into a rough mash called pomace. It smells greener than a cut apple, sharper, and it stains the floor of the shed the color of weak tea.

The pomace goes onto cloths, one scoop at a time, and each cloth is folded into a square parcel. Stacked, alternating with wooden racks, they make the cider press — a tower of cloth and wood that looks like a loaf, or a layer cake of cider and sawdust.

Then the pressing begins, and the cider runs, a thick brown stream that hits the collecting pan and froths. The first pressings are cloudy and loud; the stream slows, the cloths weep, the press is tightened again. Sweet cider is not the clear juice of the supermarket shelf. It is opaque, tannic, a little gritty, and it smells of the orchard in a way that makes every glass taste like October.

The press shed draws a small crowd on pressing days. Neighbors come to talk, to buy a jug, to stand a while in the warm smell. The press operator works in quiet rhythm — scoop, fold, stack, turn — and the conversation runs around him, about the weather, the high school football team, the thickness of this year's frost.

Some of the jugs go to the farm stand, chilled and sweating against the counter. Some stay in the cooler to keep their sweetness. And some are set aside to turn, slowly, into hard cider — a colder story, applejack if the winter cooperates. But the sweet run is the main thing: sweet cider straight from the press is a fall thing and a Northeast thing, drunk cold or hot, with nutmeg or a cinnamon stick from the jar that has been there since last year.

Smoke, sugar, and the farm stand

By late October the farm stand does its best business of the year. The bins up front hold the pick-your-own varieties; the back counter stacks cider donuts fried that morning and dusted with cinnamon sugar, gone by midafternoon. The scent of hot oil and nutmeg hangs over the register, and there is usually a ghost or a scarecrow lashed to the porch rail with cornstalks, because October is a decorating month in a way September never is.

The cider itself is sold by the half gallon and the gallon, in plastic jugs that fog in the cool air. Some orchards keep the press going all day and sell from a spigot by the shed door, paper cups stacked alongside. The taste changes a little through the run: the first pressing is all sharpness, the last is rounder and deeper, and people argue over which one they came for.

People come out for the apples and stay for the afternoon. Kids ride the hay wagon through the rows where the trees are picked clean; parents stand in the dooryard with paper cups of mulled cider, steam rising into air that tastes of leaf smoke. Some farms press cider on the weekends, and watching the press run is part of the outing — the wheel turning, the cloths stacking, the thin brown river pouring into a pan. It is a good thing to show a child, that an apple becomes a liquid and that juice becomes a season.

Home kitchens get in on it too. Cider goes into the slow cooker with cinnamon and cloves for an afternoon that smells like the whole house has been wrapped in a quilt. It is splashed into pork and into squash soup and, reduced over low heat, boiled down to a thick dark syrup that glazes a baked apple or sweetens a pie. Leaves race down the gutters outside; inside, someone is reading the weekend paper with a mug of hot cider between both hands.

The cellar keeps the year

The last pressing comes the week before Halloween, after the school trips have stopped and the pick-your-own field is stripped. The crew takes the final bins to the press and runs them through before the ground freezes solid. Some farms press on into November if the varieties hold, but the main run ends with the month, as it always has.

What the press makes, October tries to keep. Jugs go into the freezer and come out in the deep of February, gold and icy, the ice pushed up against the cap; the cider thaws sweeter for the wait, and the first hot cup of it tastes like this month remembered. A jar of boiled cider sits in the pantry door, dark as molasses, and a spoon of it in hot water is the quickest remedy for a cold afternoon. Other jugs are set on a shelf with the lid loose and slowly turn — to vinegar first, then to something sharper, amber, useful for the next season's pickling and pan sauces. Down in the cellar, the last of the storage apples line up in crates, each one wrapped in newspaper, each crate perfuming the dark at a steady apple pace.

By the time the jack-o'-lanterns slump on the porches and the leaves have all come down, the orchard is quiet. The ladders are stored in the barn loft; the press is cleaned, hosed down, and covered with a tarp until next fall. There is a particular sound that goes with the end of October — dry cornstalks in the wind, the grate of a rake over bare earth, the hollow knock of a lone apple falling where nobody is left to pick it up.

But the month does not end in an empty shed. The cider is put by, the kitchen is warm, and the company is the point. October's harvest is what people do together: the picking, the pressing, the donuts, the long evenings with a jug passed hand to hand. The frost will keep coming and the light will keep shortening, but the cellar is full and the year ahead has a good taste to it.