I enjoy winter. It's my favorite season. Carolyn tolerates it as do most of the more normal residents of this state. For those, (and there are many), who question the integrity of my neural wiring, I just like it. It's cool, OK?

Last fall in an attempt to while away the waning hours of summer before the arrival of the really delightful winter weather I attended the Scowhegan Pulp Truck and Cider Festival. This is a little known, but well attended festival honoring Maine's harvest season and paying tribute to two well-known Maine crops; trees and apples. It's a real family festival which combines some of the better elements of a wine tasting, and a monster truck competition in a festive atmosphere that could only be found in Maine just before winter.

I missed the exciting first day which featured pulp truck races, the election of the Festival Queen, the amateur chain-saw juggling, and the always exciting combination canoe race and apple bobbing contest in the Kennebeck river.

The second day is always the highlight, however. This is the day that the cleaned up and hosed down Shop N Save parking lot is flooded with four semi-trailer loads of apples and a dozen or more fully loaded pulp trucks are driven onto the lot. What happens next is a pure ballet of truck driving skill. Those trucks twist and turn, thunder and roar in thrilling precise maneuvers that I could not adequately describe as they reduce those apples to a brown juiceless mush. I joined the line at the storm drain to catch some of the resulting cider in my embossed festival cup before it hit the barrel at the bottom for later distribution. That cider has a taste and bouquet that is seldom matched anywhere.

The whole festival is enjoyable, but my favorite event is the last one; the Children's Cherry-Picker Cider Squeeze. In this contest a child stands beside each participating pulp truck with one of the festival's official embossed paper cups clutched in a chubby little hand. The pulp truck operator must pick up one apple from the parking lot surface with his hydraulic log loading arm (the cherry-picker), position it over the cup of the child assigned to his truck, and squeeze it until the cup is full of cider, or the apple has no more juice. To those of you not familiar with the intricacies of operating this equipment, I can assure you that it takes a skilled and steady hand to accomplish this operation. One false finger twitch, and a trusting child ends up wearing fresh applesauce.

A number of years ago I attended one of the first Common Ground Fairs. This was in the hey-day of the back-to-the-land movement fueled in large part by people who had not grown up in Maine, had never milked a cow, and who's main introduction to soil was the stuff collected in vacuum cleaner bags. I was deeply impressed by the shear volume of information that these newly de-urbanized folks were throwing around about country living.

No question daunted them. They seemed to know everything there was to know about everything. No field of farming knowledge was closed to them. It was all very impressive. These folks were veritable founts of agricultural acumen. 'And talk? My, they could bend your ear for hours on something like the correct depth to plant a pea. If it was important they knew about it. If it wasn't important, they still knew about it. I was impressed.

To tell the truth, I was also uneasy. My parents had taught a degree of caution, and had advised a bit of humility in the treatment of any subject in the natural world. Nothing can leave you with literal and figurative egg on your face faster than the capricious natural kingdom.

Well, it happened. The newly countrified fair organizers had put a beekeeping exhibit in close proximity to a stand that was offering fresh-baked bread covered with butter and honey. I was hungry. The honey on bread looked mighty good in spite of the usual outrageous fair prices. It was when I got in line that I became aware of a problem.

The neighboring bees had found the honey also, and they didn't have to pay outrageous fair prices. In fact, they didn't have to pay anything. They just set about taking what they wanted. I was hungry and I had paid dearly for my honey covered bun, but when you swing honey and bread toward your mouth with several opportunistic native bees walking around right where you plan to take a bite, the whole thing looses some of its appeal.