Between Houston Street and what is today called Schipps Lane, my grandfather owned a good chunk of land, and he built a house on it, and across the expansive lawn, he built a long shed with a series of double doors that opened as individual garages, maybe four or five.

That sort of architecture has vanished over the years but was very popular in the 1920’s and 30’s for storing the new-fangled automobiles, and you can still see some of these garages around the country, even in Astoria, Queens, with their big double opening doors on hinges and a big X across the doors for stability of construction, and likely some small windows above the X. My grandfather kept his car in one of these, a Buick, and rented out the others to railway workers who parked their cars there while they were working on the railway or went out on the road. The Maybrook Railyard was just a skip away, and the “Y” was at the end of Schipps Lane.

I don’t know which came first, the house he built or the apple trees, as the land may have been an old orchard when he bought it, but one of the prominent features of the back yard which ran from street to street was the aging and unkept apple trees found there, just scattered, scattered about, some on this end of the lawn, some on that. They were a mix of crab apples and bigger apples like Northern Spy. Lots of people had crab apple trees. It’s what they made their hard cider from – they liked their alcohol – and the other apples were for baking because most homesteads at the turn of the twentieth century were, to some degree, self-sufficient. Northern Spy apples were great for baking pies.

The trees, by our youth, were unkept and no longer pruned in a timely and useful way, and this time of year the apples would fall to the lawn and wait for the mower to do them in, and the yellow jackets were thick on the skins sucking their apple juice. Gramps was a fine gardener and kept a small, productive garden on the north side of Houston behind his metal working shop, but he did not have time to keep up with the fruit trees when he was home from his piloting of trains on the New Haven Line to Hartford.

It was never clear how the groups formed, but almost as natural as Homo sapiens get, two sets of children set themselves up in that big backyard that felt more like a field and when the apples were good and ripe, and, by that, I mean rotten, and teams formed, usually by familiarity and family, and the rotten apple wars were on.

There were no rules that I can remember, and girls played too, if I may call it “play”. On our side we had the big Spy tree, and the apples were bigger than our hands and just rotten enough that when they hit the enemy’s body they splattered pretty good and nobody was sitting on the good furniture after the fight. On the upper side, which was around the neighbor’s tree, a big crab apple, there were a bunch of Brockers in from Walden visiting some family connection and maybe some Bellarosa’s from across 208. My own team had my brother who, while always in tough shape, could never throw very well and had poor aim. Except that time, he hit me in the back of the head with a Campbell’s Soup can. There was some blood that day. But he was tenacious and fearless, so that made up for his lack of an arm. And sometimes, too, I remember Keith Muller being there, probably visiting Aunt Val, an aunt we had in common, so we were sort of cousins, and he was thin as spaghetti and fast, later, being a track guy in high school, long distance, and his arm was like a rocket and as a farm boy, wild as his unkept hair. He is still alive, so I have to be careful what I say.

But the teams were pretty even though no one made them up, they just materialized, and this was not just one event but repeated the same time of year for a number of years, oddly, without synchronicity and certainly without supervision. The war went on and got hotter and hotter and wilder and a bit more angry as it developed, like an animalized game of dodgeball, and it went until someone was hurt so bad, by general consensus, it had to stop. That is, until somebody was crying uncontrollably. It would end, abruptly, the teams disappearing into the trees and edges of the backyards as if no one had been there, and any damages, human or property, were hidden from the adults as if by law. It’s what being in a village meant to a country kid. It’s what villages were for. Can you follow? But we stayed away from those garages, from those garage windows, for any damage there and there would be true hell to pay. If any of those cars, if that Buick…