The Smuggled French Apple
By Donna Olmstead
I forgot the organic French apple was in my purse.
When I said I had no agricultural products to declare on my U.S. Customs form I believed it.
Several years ago, the European Union and the United States officially agreed to recognize each other’s organic standards. The agreement means no worries that I brought pestilence or nasty chemicals with me or threatened anyone’s security.
But I didn’t have a permit for my apple, after all. I could have risked a fine. Certainly I would be asked to give the apple up since I didn’t declare it.
But I forgot I had it.
There it was resting beneath boarding passes, a tangle of earphones and my iPad. An apple, red with yellow streaks, that I had chosen from a dazzling array of organic fruit at a grocery in front of my son’s Paris apartment.
I love an apple, it’s beautiful, not too sweet, crisp and holds its shape while traveling. Usually by the time I’ve flown from Albuquerque to an airport hub, the apple is long gone. Too often the only other choices are strangely inedible or of indeterminate age.
That piece of fruit was a Normandy variety, grown on trees that could trace their heritage through centuries. Resilient through wars and peace, the stock outlived families who owned the orchards.
But the menu on transAtlantic Air France flight seduced me. The stewards seemed happy to serve another bite of cheese, a sip of chilled champagne or a crusty roll still warm enough to melt butter. So I nibbled and forgot the apple.
Immigration after a long flight can be intimidating. This was my first time through JFK in New York and it seemed unnecessarily confusing — signaling me that the grace and civility of Paris was over. Mazes of hallways had funneled us into a huge arena. Just a thousand people — some I recognized from my flight and some I didn’t — and flashing computer screens. Security guards were herding us toward several queues.
And memory of the apple faded.
It took a while for France to charm me — for it to feel personal and not just someone else’s history. Of course, I recognized the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower from their movie appearances.
While I was visiting, U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew my homeland from the Paris climate agreement, a contract among most countries to protect the earth and reduce greenhouse emissions. Withdrawing seemed such an alienating and dangerous backward step. The news made me feel more isolated and embarrassed to meet Parisians, but I shouldn’t have worried. They extended their sympathies to me. And the newly elected French president, Emmanuel Macron, understood this American dilemma.
He famously turned one of Trump’s phrases back on him by saying, “Make Our Planet Great Again.”
He also invited Americans from scientists to responsible citizens to join French efforts to protect the earth from global warming — to make France “a second homeland.”
Still I was visiting, not relocating. It took longer for me to find that moment in any new place — when a resemblance of something familiar makes it feel like home.
Finally on a sunny Sunday, I connected with the nodding poppies in Claude Monet’s gardens at Giverny. It wasn’t just poppies, but roses, delphiniums and lilies of all kinds, each blossom more beautiful than the next, bursting from the ground and winding around trellises and framing the much-celebrated bridge of Monet’s paintings.
I was traveling with my son and daughter-in-law, who had recently moved to France. After visiting the gardens, we ate at a roadside cafe. Those fabled Normandy apples charmed me in a Tarte de Pommes a la Normande — thin apple slices on creamy egg custard, settled into a pastry crust. It’s not a new story, I know, that of being seduced by an apple.
As we drove back to Paris, the roads wound through the ancient stone houses and opened onto fields of wheat patching the countryside together like a quilt. Tubular, white grain elevators rose from the earth, storing harvested crops here, just like they did in Kansas and Oklahoma where I grew up.
It finally seemed familiar for another reason.
My father was a wheat farmer, who counted his ability to care for his family in bushels of grain for many years. He left farming before knowledge of chemicals was more important than knowing the land.
He had been here in France during World War II — it must have seemed familiar to him too. He would tell me bedtime stories of his time in the war, many in France.
He was a corporal in the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and his company came from Persia to Italy and then approached Nazi-occupied France from the southern Mediterranean beaches in August, 1944, while other Allied troops had stormed the country through Normandy earlier in June of that year.
As they marched north, my dad, then 24 years old, and his fellow soldiers built pontoon bridges across rivers while bullets whizzed overhead. They lay alert in bedrolls in ditches, listening for tanks or the jackbooted Nazi soldiers marching on the nearby road.
“It’s a different cadence than American soldiers,” he would explain and then he would tap out the rhythm of marching boots out on the headboard, until shivers ran across my body.
Other times he told me of seeing farmhouses like these, near Giverny, on the horizon as they marched. And about the families who lived there, who were grateful to the GI’s. Of sharing food and Army-issued chocolate with children.
These were stories he edited for me. They helped us both understand where he had been and made that war, one of our family stories.
There is a photo of the GI’s being welcomed to Paris in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. One smiling young soldier has round-frame black glasses like my father wore. In the grainy photo it seems it could him or anyone else’s dad. There is also an exhibit of Army uniforms from the those days of the liberation of France. And I recognize the rations and mess kit from those stories he told.
My dad was grateful to the farmers, who shared an apple or other fresh fruit, if they had it. They had survived so many years on so little during the Nazi occupation. Having fruit was a welcome break from the rations. These stories he would tell as he ate an apple with his lunch, slice by slice.
My apple came to my attention again after I hiked up from the international terminal to a domestic terminal where a plane would take me home. I passed through all the security checks, without every being questioned about it. Maybe they didn’t notice or maybe they didn’t care.
In Terminal II the aromas from the fast food court, collided and seemed to drift in waves, a medley of frying fat. Visually, I was assaulted by the American Obesity Epidemic — two-thirds of U.S. citizens are obese or overweight, according to recent government figures. And that seemed like the proportion I observed. Yet, here were my poor, swollen and misshapen countrymen, loading up on fries and shakes. Not much on offer could pass for healthy anywhere.
I felt weary. I couldn’t stomach the menu.
I went to find a seat to wait for the plane. I felt in my handbag for my boarding pass.
At the very bottom of my bag, my fingers wrapped around the organic French apple, a delightful surprise, familiar and welcoming.