Apples, Autumn, The World Series, Sunday Drives and Dreams of My Dad

This picture of my Dad and Doug was taken forty-six years ago at Nine Eagles State Park near the Iowa-Missouri border southeast of Davis City. It was a beautiful fall day not unlike the ones we've been experiencing lately. I don't think there was a particular reason for our jaunt that day other than Sunday drives were a pastime for our family and we hadn't been to Nine Eagles before. Doug was three years old and Dad was close to the age Doug is now.
I've been thinking about apple orchards. It is the time of year when we used to go to an apple orchard somewhere to get apples. There was one in northern Missouri that we went to with Grandpa and Grandma Ridnour when I was little. There were free samples of apple cider so good I wanted more. And we did bring a few jugs home with us. The aroma of a trunk full of fresh apples filled the car on the way home. We all had an apple to eat. I remember Grandma chastising me because I left so much good apple on my core. She said I should eat everything but the seeds and stem like she did. Nunh uh. No way. (The only other person I have seen eat an apple that way is my husband.)
In later years Mom and Dad would drive up to the apple orchard at Griswold. Dad was known to have a 'lead foot' when he drove. One year he was stopped for speeding on the way home. Mom always talked about what an expensive bushel of apples they got that year.

I don't have dreams about Dad very often - he has been gone more than thirty-three years. But last night I dreamed about him and in the dream he looked much as he did in this picture - younger than I ever knew him. (I'm guessing this picture of him and his little sister, Leona, was taken around 1940.)
All the topics in the title of this piece combined in a dream of driving all over northwest Missouri - enjoying the autumn colors and looking for an apple orchard. We stopped at a park in a small town and got out to eat a picnic lunch. There were a lot of other people in the park and we started visiting with them - exchanging names, home towns, etc. One of the people thought he had heard of my Dad. I said, "Oh, you should have seen him when he was still playing baseball." Seems he was an almost famous ball player. And, as I said, he looked like he did in this photo - young, tall, thin - even though I was in my twenties or thirties.
There was some sort of fall festival going on in the town. One of the vendors was selling wine which I so badly wanted to buy - if I could just figure out a way to do it without Dad knowing. Maybe if it had been apple cider I would have succeeded in buying some!

"Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream."   Khalil Gibran