I’m five years old, and I’m sitting in the back seat of my father’s Ford sedan, which is a dull brown and dust-covered from driving up and down our township’s gravel roads. We’re parked alongside one of those roads near a country church, its clapboards painted white. Next to the churchyard, there’s a wire fence that separates it from a cornfield, the dry stalks still waiting to be cut. The sun is shining, and there’s an uncommon warmth for early November. It’s Election Day, and the church is a polling place. My mother is inside casting her vote while my father stays with me in the car. Either he’s already gone in and voted, or he’s waiting for my mother to come back so he can take his turn.

An elderly gentleman walks across the churchyard and leans down to talk with my father. What do they talk about? The weather most likely, the crops, the grain prices. It’s 1960, and America is about to elect its first Roman Catholic President, John F. Kennedy. We live in a predominantly Republican county; it remains red to this day. For years, my father will joke that my mother’s Republican vote always canceled out his Democratic one. My mother never said a word. She never revealed her vote.

The elderly gentleman has a gunny sack full of apples, and he asks my father if I can have one. My father says I can, and the man reaches into the sack and pulls out the biggest Golden Delicious apple I’ve ever seen. I hold it with two hands. I wait until the elderly gentleman has gone to take my first bite.

I’ve never forgotten that apple, and the man’s kind voice, and the sweet taste when I bit into the flesh. Each year at election time, I think of it, that apple. I’m afraid there’s not much of a story here—a man talking to my father and offering me an apple—but there’s something pure and innocent about this memory, something lovely. It’s lived with me now for sixty-four years. The white church, the cornfield, the man, and his generous gift of that Golden Delicious apple. Two farmers talking on an Indian Summer day in 1960. Who knows if their politics matched. They were neighbors. They were like all the working people in Lukin Township, just trying to get from one day to the next.

Do with this what you will. As for me, I’ll hold onto the memory of that apple this election season. It was the most marvelous thing, coming as it did from what’s known as a chance seedling, a plant that was the product of unintentional breeding, possibly a hybrid of Grimes Golden and Golden Reinette—two varieties becoming one.