A Taste of Fall

With a gentle knock, my friend Beau hesitantly brings his face to the narrow window of the cell door. His timing couldn't be much better; the movie I was watching just ended. I wave him in.

He's holding his mug, the same transparent plastic kind that everybody in prison owns. Amber liquid sloshes around inside. "Get a cup," he says with an excited smile. "You'll want to try this."

I turn off my TV and eye his mug with skepticism. For just an instant, I fear he might be trying to give me alcohol. I've gone decades without drinking any of the blinding trash-bag booze that some prisoners ferment under their bunks, and I'm not interested in trying the stuff now. Even though Beau doesn't have substance use issues, I have trust issues and can't help but wonder....

Beau grins, almost conspiratorially. He says, "It's hot apple cider."

I'm confused, that's the only word for it. There's a thriving black market for contraband foodstuffs here, but cider isn't something I've ever known to exist inside the prison fences. It just isn't the sort of innocent thing people here usually crave.

"Well, it's kinda apple cider. I made it. It's fantastic."

A little warily, I retrieve a cup, which he proceeds to pour two fingers of his concoction into.

I take a whiff. It smells like cinnamon. Cautiously, I sip.

He reads the perplexity on my face. This beverage is surprising, to say the least. We don't have access to apple juice, nor to fresh apples in quantities enough to crush for drinking. This so-called cider is something else. Either I'm delusional or it's a passable stand-in for the real thing—hot, tart, sweet, and appropriately spiced.

"I know, right?" Beau enthuses. He takes a swig and smacks his lips with delight. "Tell me that doesn't taste like camping and hikes through the woods and trick-or-treating. It's actually powdered lemonade, honey, cinnamon, and butter. Butter is key. It rounds out the flavor, adds richness."

This stuff is good. Beau's usually pretty successful at engineering interesting recipes. Maybe that comes with having a degree in organic chemistry. We stand in my cell, letting this cider's pleasant volatility entice our olfactory systems.

I try to think back to my childhood and autumn nights with family friends who lived out in the country. They always had hot apple cider on hand, and we'd sit beside a bonfire, our faces warm, our backs cold, as we nursed Styrofoam cups of scalding sweet liquid. I remember once burning my tongue and the roof of my mouth on it, so that I couldn't taste anything for days but still drank the whole cup and went back for seconds, afterward. Is Beau's "cider" actually similar to that cider, or can I simply no longer recall cider's flavor?

"Don't overthink it," he says, "just enjoy it."

So I release my weak grip on the past, and my lame philosophical fumblings, and take another sip.