Autumn affords organic rhythms to connection and community. The harvest season has brought people together across the centuries and civilizations. The abundance of produce that orchards and farms provide each autumn offers a natural cause to come together. 

 

A single apple tree can provide a cause for neighbors to come together.  “A mature apple tree produces more apples than any one family can ever eat!”  shared Dan Lagerborg in our conversation about the annual rhythms his apple tree has created over the years. The ancient Macintosh apple tree on their property in Littleton is an icon from another era. It is the last remaining apple tree from when their property was an orchard. Every year, its abundance has facilitated a day of memorable apple crushing for the celebration of fresh-from-the-tree apple cider. But it is the absence of apples this year that is giving Dan a point of reflection with his family, friends, and neighbors.

 

This year an abnormally warm winter caused apple trees to bud early, and a single late spring freeze eliminated every bloom in the city.  “There is not a single apple grown in Denver this year!”  said Dan ardently. The statement may have a rare exception, but conversations at City Park Farmer’s Market this summer sadly confirm the tragic truth: there is an absence of apples. The natural rhythms of autumn have been interrupted. Within the unforeseen interruption, there is an unexpected invitation. 

 

How does the practice of noticing what is missing from autumn’s annual rhythms help us love our neighbors and neighborhoods? Absence can provide a clearer perspective than presence. When something is absent, we only then may recognize the real value of its presence. It is in seasons of physical injury and unhealth that we more fully appreciate how well our bodies have cared for us and how our value of health has often gone unnoticed. The Catholic author Ronald Rolheiser writes,  “Sometimes only our absence can deepen and cleanse our presence."  It may be that the true value isn’t seen until the absence is felt. There are important lessons and invitations to be learned in the absence of apples.

 

Annual rhythms marked by generosity are profoundly important to cultivating connection to each other. Apple picking and apple pressing are practices that celebrate the abundance of a single apple tree among friends and neighbors. Each autumn offers an annual reminder of the generative gifts of our gardens, vines, and trees. An autumn with the absence of apples is an invitation to notice and name what is missing. Instead of raising a glass of apple cider in celebration this autumn, it may be raising a glass in consolation—not only for the neighborhood apple tree without apples, but in shared lament for every farm and orchard that has experienced the absence this year. It is a practice of being present and noticing what is missing. 

Practice

1. Notice the natural world. Notice what's missing in your neighborhood and at local farmers’ markets.

   
   

2. Continue to gather. Host your friends and neighbors; acknowledge the gathering is without the usual produce or activities.

   
   

3. Lament what is absent. Grieve together. Say out loud what is lost.

   
   

4. Celebrate what grew. Look for the abundance that did show up this year. Give thanks for the goodness that is present.

   
   

   
   

   
   

Down a winding country road through Colorado’s North Fork Valley, Big B’s Delicious Orchards emerges through the trees like an oasis: thirty acres of fruit trees against the high desert, cottonwoods holding rope swings, ponds for paddling, and the West Elk Mountains rising beyond the orchard.

 

Big B’s  has been taking shape for more than sixty years. Bob Kokes planted the orchard in 1965. In 1973, Bernie Heideman (Big B himself!) began pressing local fruit into juice. The Schwartz family later added cider and brought Delicious Orchards into Big B’s in 2006. Over time, Big B’s organically grew into a place to gather, play, celebrate, and belong. Part of what makes Big B’s unusual is how fully it invites people into the life of the orchard. Visitors can camp between the fruit trees. Full campground facilities make it possible to stay comfortably, while the café becomes a gathering place where campers share meals, listen to live music, and spend the evening together. 

 

Alli and Daniel Coffey have invited friends to camp beneath the trees every year since 2020 to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, a Jewish festival celebrating God’s provision in the wilderness through shared meals and temporary shelters. Beneath a row of fruit trees, they set one long table and string lights through the branches. Candles are lit. A friend who is a chef prepares a feast with food sourced from Colorado, including fruits and vegetables grown at Big B’s. Children ride bikes through the orchard while friends gather around the table to sing, laugh, tell stories, and share both what they are grateful for and what they still long for. 

 

“There is something Sabbath-like about Big B’s,”  shares Alli. It’s a place that makes you want to explore and experience with all your senses: to taste a ripe Honeycrisp, feel the thrill of swinging on the rope swing, notice the changing light, and eat with friends until the stars appear.  Alli calls it a place of  “friendly wildness.”

 

And then there are years like this one. An April freeze devastated much of Western Colorado’s orchards, including Big B’s fruit crop, leaving the orchard without its usual harvest in 2026. We are so accustomed to produce year-round in our grocery stores that it can be easy to forget what it means to belong to an organic world. We expect abundance without season and provision without much attention to the conditions that make it possible. But orchards remind us that life is seasonal, vulnerable, and dependent. Frost, rain, soil, and timing all matter. Fruit is never guaranteed. This year that was evident to every guest at Big B’s.

 

An orchard returns us to limits we have learned to resist. There are years of abundance and years of loss, and we are not separate from those rhythms, even if modern life makes it easy to imagine that we are. Orchards give us a place to imagine what it might mean to walk with God again, not outside the limits of the created world, but within them. We make room for play without productivity, delight without usefulness, and attention without hurry. We remember that we are creatures within an organic world, not machines standing outside of it. Orchards invite us back into seasonality, dependence, risk, rest, play, and delight. Big B’s Delicious Orchards is a sacred place. 

Katie Lukashow is the Creative Director for Sacred Place. She and her husband spent several fall afternoons at Big B’s, sipping cold-pressed cider under the orchard limbs. Now living in New Mexico, she still considers Colorado’s Western Slope her home away from home.

Thank you to Alli Coffey for the conversation and contribution to this article.