Cider
A while ago Nicole and I purchased some apple cider at a farm stand and later that week we made hot cider. Turns out we’ve had, for who knows how long, this green box of mulling spices in the pantry, wedged between boxes of tea bags. Since we married eight years ago, Nicole and I have gone grocery shopping many times, and even when we don’t do the shopping together, we usually put groceries away together—and nowhere in my memory is there an image of one of us packing away anything for cider.
But when the thought recently occurred to us that apple cider would be nice to have, we looked, and behold, there was a box of mulling spices.
We’ve made hot cider a few times since then, and this weekend I made and photographed a mug of it, trying to catch the wisps of steam rising into the air, but they didn’t come out, and I was left with a less dramatic shot.
The last time I drank hot cider, before this autumn season, was in 1996, at a New Year’s Eve party to which Nicole and I had been invited. We had already dated and broken up, and she arrived with her new boyfriend. I was the only one who seemed to realize or care that I was, in fact, superior in every possible way to the new guy: he was shorter, greasier, less literate: he wouldn’t knew a Hemingway reference if it gored him like a bull. I had, for that matter, just finished reading The Sun Also Rises, and I felt that night like Robert Cohn, moping after Lady Ashley, unable to stop staring and moping amid the frivolity around me. The hostess of the party brought me a mug of hot cider, and we all sat on couches watching Barefoot in the Park until it was midnight, and then, of course, all the couples in the room kissed. I just watched, refusing to leave, though I knew everyone wanted me to.
So, right: I drank hot cider that night, thirteen years ago, and then a lot of time went by: Nicole and the guy broke up in the end, and eventually she married me, and right now she’s in another room of the house we share, catering a sleepover party for our oldest daughter and her friend. Of course, hot cider tastes much better now than it did then.
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