The Pink Lady is not an American 60s high school teen wearing a pink jacket. It is a trademark brand name for a variety of apples known as the Cripps Pink. Only the best Cripps Pink apples can be labelled Pink Lady.
The Pink Lady is my favourite apple. This small apple is crunchy, incredibly sweet, and just have that special something that make me love it so. Move aside all those Royal Galas and Red Delicious. You pale in comparison.
When I was a child, I loved apples so much that I had dreamed of owning my own apple tree one day. Which is quite an ambition since I live in the tropics and have only seen banana, coconut and papaya trees in anyone’s backyard.
And this apple talk brings me back to that same period of my life, when I was about ten, when my cousin Keith shared with me a series of books which his mom had bought from England. They were C.S. Lewis‘ The Chronicles of Narnia. In one of the stories The Magician’s Nephew, the young child Digory Kirke brought back from Narnia a silver apple given to him by the lion king Aslan. After his mother ate the apple and became well again, Digory planted the apple core in his garden on an impluse. A tree soon grew. After many years, when Digory became an aged professor, the tree was felled by a storm and he had it made into a wardrobe. Unknown to him, the wardrobe could lead one back to the land of Narnia – and this led to the first book of the chronicles The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
Even now as an adult, I think about the wardrobe sometimes. When I want to escape to another world.
This morning was one of those times. When I bit into my Pink Lady.
I long for a day of escape, through a wardrobe made from an apple tree (a Pink Lady, nothing less) and enter a land where my backyard is an apple orchard.
But short of that, I would have to settle for one imaginary apple today.
Pink Lady drawn with Faber-Castell watercolour pencils.
Actually, I did not draw by looking at the apple but at a photo I took of the apple. After all that day dreaming of the wardrobe and Narnia, by the time I wanted to draw it – this was all that was left.
Pink lady are our favourite apple too!
Apple looks delicious.
Thank you! : )