Welcome to the Conversations That Matter Podcast. It is the 11th of October, so happy

Columbus Day to everyone out there. You probably didn't even know some of you that

it was Columbus Day. There's not a whole lot of fanfare unless

you're in certain communities I suppose. And growing up you know Columbus Day was

important and special in a way for me not not as much because of Columbus as much as because we got the day off school and of course my mom would would talk a little bit about the significance of Christopher Columbus which I'll get to in a minute but we would go to further upstate in New York than we lived and we would

pick apples. That was the day we would do apple picking. It's the getting

towards the peak of fall, very pretty, depending on where you are. If you're in way up state in the Adirondex, especially, it's probably already past peak, but we wouldn't go quite that far. Today, where I live now in New York, it actually the city especially since COVID since 9-11 and then COVID really

made this much more prevalent but city people have moved up and a lot of people

work in the city they spend their weekends though in the Hudson Valley and so the the area that I live actually has a lot of orchards but if you go there for apple picking these days you're it's just especially on a weekend

you probably just don't want to do it it's gonna be really expensive and you're going for the

experience you're not going because it makes economical sense.

When I was growing up, it did make economic sense.

You could go and pick up drops, actually. The apples had a drop from the trees get a bag and you would pay less and it was

it was an honor system people you know just kind of trusted each other and here's here's a bag for

drops and it's going to be less expensive but New York

State legislature maybe a decade ago made that illegal you can't do that anymore

can't pick up the drops so and why did they do that I'm exactly sure. I must have something to do with health concern. I don't know. I don't know. They probably did it in the name of health concerns, but it probably had nothing to really do with health concerns. But anyway, we would pick up the drops. It would be, you know,

inexpensive. My mom would make apple pies. We would make apple sauce. We would eat

the apples, of course, out on the orchard and usually it was a really nice family dry we'd have a picnic or something

Those are my memories of Columbus Day growing up there was nothing negative attached to it there was nothing bad about it

When I was a kid and many of you probably have similar experiences if you're my age or older.

Unfortunately, that's no longer the case, generally speaking, at least, in the United States.

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