I never dreamed I’d complain about applesauce. But picking apples and making applesauce have become my husband’s new BIG hobby.

It started when he helped his sister pick her apples while visiting in MN a few weeks ago. When we got home, he started on our daughter’s trees. And then the applesauce binge started.

After my freezer and my daughter’s freezer contained all they could hold, he sent me on a neighborhood walk to disperse the growing pile of quart-sized bags of fresh warm applesauce. This is a problem, as I don’t know many neighbors yet, so there I stood at the doors of the few I knew and explained I was the new neighbor down the street and felt like a Girl Scout cookie gal, but my husband was into making applesauce and would they please take some.

It might have been okay if the ordeal stopped then. But no, after my daughter’s trees, he started on her neighbors’. He’d knock on the door and ask, of course, and two neighbors with three laden trees obliged. One even brought out a ladder for him.

My response? “I don’t want to see any more apples here.” We still had pails full in the garage.

So, after picking, he went places to give them out on his way home: at the gas pump, the teachers’ lounge of our grandkids’ school, and a few construction sites.

A woman from church stopped over to greet us; she left with apples and applesauce. The maintenance man who came in to shut off our automatic lawn sprinkling system left with apples and applesauce. Two neighbors stopped in for more.

And he continues to make applesauce. But his usual recipe of meticulously dicing unpeeled apples, cooking in four-quart-sized pans, and adding honey and cinnamon, has apparently gotten boring. So, among the finely chopped pieces of apple peels in the sauce, I now find strawberries or peaches or raisins or nuts, or any combination of them, which I must admit add some nice flavors and crunch.

But yesterday when he added bacon bits (because he had an old jar that he wasn’t using for anything else), I said, “Enough! I want none of that batch.” No problem for him, however, because he’d already given some to neighbors.

Well, I tell you, today he brought his applesauce to church and left a few bags in the minister’s study on his desk.  When I told my sisters about his latest dispersal, one said, “Most people take their Bibles to church. Applesauce is unique.”

Indeed.

Some folks wondered what Marv would do once we moved; they know I get busy attending classes or doing anything that comes my way.

Well, folks, you need not wonder.  At least not for now.

Meanwhile, stop by for coffee; he also makes apple bread and apple crisp. And we’ll soon have homemade apple butter–from that woman at church.