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MISSOURI APPLES 🍎
Crisp early-fall mornings like this one remind me of apples. Crisp red, green, yellow apples of our mid-Missouri locale, come along with our annual harvests of its as nice pumpkins, corn, watermelon.
Back in the early 1990s, while convalescing from life-changing surgery, I used to drive aimlessly alone down Hwy 24 into the heart of apple country, to clear my soul.
It ran roughly east-west northerly of and somewhat parallel to, the Missouri River, through what I later learned was termed "Little Dixie," owing to the dense concentration of African slaves in this part of the state. I learned these demographic facts a few years later, when I was assigned the Brooks Chapel AME Church ministry as pastor in Butler, Missouri, 60 miles south of Kansas City, in Bates County, Missouri, in 1995. That was where I began my serious study of our state's and our nation's dramatic Civil War history.
Getting back to apples, this may be a good time to make an apple pie.