Saturday morning, mid-September. It’s apple time, and so we jump in the car and head for Schartner’s Farms in Thorndike.

Up the driveway we roll from our house in Troy, crushing a few green crabapples in the dirt, and drive along Route 220 toward the orchards. The sun is warm, and gold-colored not only by poetic fantasies of autumn, but in actuality. We hum past fields of cow corn and hayrolls shrinking in the distance. In the maples and oaks, blazes of red and orange are already breaking out. It’s been impossible this September to imagine anywhere else on Earth with weather or land more beautiful than central Maine’s. May no fate misunderstand me – that will change by January; but during autumn in Maine, the world balances on a dream of the divine.

Beside Schartner’s gravel driveway are row on row of apple trees. My wife, Bonnie, and 12-year-old son, Jack, and I make a beeline for the farm store fixed up neatly in a shed at the side of the barn, and collect paper bags for the fruits of the work. Ben the chow, lying chained near the door like a guardian lion, watches with stern curiosity as we walk across the grass to the trees.

They’re flush and heavy with apples, ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, cherish in hand and not let fall. All we can use is a couple of bags, though. They grow in russet clusters so much like blossoms they’re heartwarming and almost dazzling. So many that when Jack reaches out – “Wow, look at that big red one!” – the snap knocks two more onto the grass. Off to the cider-apple heap with those, we figure.

In minutes the first bag is nearly full of round red McIntoshes. We wonder how to prolong this, and look down the rows of trees diminishing in the distance like a complete silent lesson in perspective for painting students.

“Let’s get another kind,” Jack says, and Bonnie points out we’d learned the Cortlands are ripe now too. So we duck between two heavy-laden trees, cross the tractor-wheel ruts between rows, brush under a golden delicious tree whose fruits are not quite ripe, and emerge among the Cortlands. Could this possibly be a twinge of guilt about the McIntosh roads not taken, where we’ve left so many apples unpicked?

“I’m helping too,” a tiny voice says. Ten trees up, a miniature person with a gold-sparkled lavender jacket reaches for the lowest-hanging branch, plucks a huge apple, and holding it in one hand, a half-eaten apple in the other, she scurries to the cart her mom is pulling and tosses it in.

The September sun and apple-smelling air must be like a vision to Katie Sue Ritchie, 11/2 years old with a smile like a candle glow in her first walking autumn. She darts back to the tree and tugs at another half-green Cortland.

We pick and pile apples in our second bag, and tuck more Cortlands on top of the Macs. Our arms begin to ache with the weight, and Jack discovers the hard way the dynamic limitations of brown paper and finger-strength.

They say firewood warms you twice, once when you cut it and again when you burn it. But apples warm you at least three times – first when you lay eyes on them ripening in the orchard, again when you pick them, and a third time when you eat them. After apple-picking comes the delirium of devouring them in any of the ways your mother made them – the shiny whole fruits, and in steaming pies and pastries, cakes, cobblers, crisps and crumbles, muffins, custards, dumplings, puddings, pancakes, puffs and strudels, tarts and turnovers, fritters, salads, soups; baked, sauced, fried, cidered, jellied, candied, chutneyed; eaten with cheese, or ice cream, or honey, or cinnamon, nutmeg and clove – I can’t remember the rest.

Maybe we needed more than two bags after all. But with arms under the loads, we head back to the store, where Sheila Schartner advises us not to make pies with McIntoshes because they get too mushy and are better for applesauce; for pies use Northern Spies and Cortlands because the slices hold their shape in the heat. Also good and outlasting even frost will be Empires, Honeycrisps, delicious (red and golden) and Macouns.

In the store we spot more signs of the season’s mellow fruitfulness – rows of, not trees this time but jars of strawberry, raspberry, blueberry jam and jelly, pickles, honey, maple syrup, dilly beans and spicy salsa. All farm-made. We select two small, perfectly shaped pumpkins for our kitchen table. Bonnie spots a vase of giant yellow sunflowers and wants some, so Sheila volunteers to cut four beauties. Ben the guard-chow by his silence appears to approve.

While we’re settling up the account, lavender-clad Katie comes rubbing her eyes, along with her mom, Heidi, and their cart full of apples. Katie’s first experience of autumn warmth will no doubt last her lifetime, as it does for all of us from Maine, whether she remembers snapshots of this golden afternoon or simply long redreams it in her apple-picking sleep, whatever sleep it is.

Dana Wilde is a copy editor at the Bangor Daily News and assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine in Orono. He can be reached at dana.wilde@umit.maine.edu.