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Lately, I’ve been thinking about Snap-Apple Night. When I was barely twenty-two, I was working as a living history interpreter at the Homeplace-1850 at Land Between the Lakes in Tennessee. Every day I dressed in costume (long dress, petticoat, frilly day cap, brogans) and, along with a pseudo family of other interpreters, lived out daily life on a working historic farm. I cooked on a wood stove in the “double pen” log house and learned to make a mean batch of buttermilk biscuits, while the men worked in the tobacco fields and waited for the sound of the dinner bell. That fall, I had just arrived and was still adjusting to life after college in Wisconsin. It wasn’t only the 1850 life that was different – Tennessee was like a different universe altogether at times. I still remember the man (my age) who, within minutes of meeting me and my pretty roommate, told us that he had everything he could want in life (pickup truck, trailer house, dog, rifle) save one: a wife. “And a wife can be hard to find,” he drawled, eying us up to see if he had a taker. I and my roommate, a college graduate from Indianapolis, raised our eyebrows at one another: could we possibly have heard that right?

But, Snap-Apple Night. This was an event put on for the public at the Homeplace to show how Halloween was celebrated in the 1850s. I don’t remember all the historical details that we had to memorize to share with people – I don’t even remember what “Snap-Apple” refers to. I remember only the magic on that crisp night of stepping onto the dark, tree-shrouded gravel road that led to the farm. Luminaries flickered along both sides of the road, dimly lighting the hundred yards to the house, where lanterns glowed on the edges of the porches and in every window. Dozens of carved pumpkins lined the edge of the porches, too, their faces bright in the otherwise utter darkness.

I had a bad cold, was practically delirious with Nyquil. But the event required each of the ten or so staff members, plus many volunteers. There was no chance to call in sick.

My job that night was to tell fortunes. I huddled next to the flaming wood stove in the kitchen, wrapped in my wool plaid dress and about four handmade shawls, trying to keep from shivering. The idea was, peel an apple in as long a continuous peel as possible, raise the peel above my head and circle it around three times, and then toss it over my shoulder (the left one, I think) onto the yellow oilcloth floor. (Was this “snapping the apple”?) Then I’d look to see what letter of the alphabet the peel resembled, and that would be the first letter of the first name of the person that you were going to marry. People lined up out the door. Hour after hour, I peeled apples, did the routine, interpreted the results (often a “J” or a “C”). I remember there were some skeptics, and some people who jumped up and down with glee. I was only one station in a flurry of activities. I think ghost stories were being told around a campfire, cider and kettle corn were being prepared and served out by the wood shed.

Even though I kept having to wipe my nose surreptitiously on my apron and I wasn’t exactly qualified to tell fortunes, Snap Apple Night was magic. And I came to love Tennessee and the Homeplace, the peacefulness, the chance (after having spent years in academics, swimming in intangible ideas) to really focus, to touch something real. I remember one day around this time making a pumpkin pie. It took me all day: clean out the pumpkin, chop it into chunks, boil the chunks on the stove for a couple of hours, keep the fire stoked. Make the pie crust from flour, lard (er, shortening, in actuality – there were some fudges in historical accuracy, for health’s sake), then mash and season the pumpkin. And then, that pie just did not want to bake. The fire in the stove was dying down, and the day was nearing its end. I couldn’t feed the fire too much wood, as then we’d have to stay until it died down, and the farm closed at five. The men had finished their end-of-day chores, putting up all the animals, locking the many outbuildings. And still my pie was not done. Kindly, they sat with me in the kitchen, waiting, as dusk, and my embarrassment, deepened. It taught me: Sometimes things just go on their own schedule. Sometimes there’s no amount of determination that can hurry them along, or change them.

It seems like fall is a good time to revisit the past; at least, I’ve been doing a fair bit of that this past month. On my way back from the South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood, I visited the Badlands in South Dakota, which brought me back to when I was fifteen years old and saw it for the first time. I was distraught at that time in my life, having just moved about eight hundred miles away from the town I’d known as my home for the past six years, and, in fifteen-year-old fashion, I thought life was pretty much over. But I remember standing and looking out over the Badlands and seeing that there was so much more that was and would be, that I would and could go on. That “home” is a relative concept. Driving through the Badlands this time, more than twice the age now that I was then, I was thinking about home again – or still. I had just presented with Katrina Kittle, the author of “The Kindness of Strangers,” at the Festival of Books on the concept of “home” in our novels.

And now I’m drawn back to thoughts of Snap-Apple Night at the Homeplace, and those moments in the Badlands, by the news that the owner of the bookstore where I have worked for four years came to tell me the other night: that the bookstore is closing at the end of the year. There had been a meeting, but, just like on Snap-Apple Night, I was down with a bad cold, and this time I called in sick. I had the quilts pulled up to my neck and was watching Lonesome Dove when she called and said she really had to speak with me that night, and would stop by.

The news leaves me feeling socked and a bit homeless, and I know I’m not the only one to feel this way: J.W. Beecroft was a home away from home for staff and customers alike, a “clean, well-lighted place” where we could find refuge from the troubles in our lives and friendship with like-minded people. It offered both predictability (same people, same general tasks week by week and day by day) and excitement (the new books!), and without my having worked there – reading, reading, reading, and talking about books every day – I doubt that Keeping the House would ever have become what it is. The loss feels a bit like a death in the family, though it isn’t one of those “failed bookstore” stories – just a story of wonderful owners who wish to have other adventures in life, and who deserve to have them.

So I stack the title “Bookseller” on the shelf next to the old title “Living History Interpreter,” as a used-to-be. Something I will take off the shelf from time to time and reread the memory of, like Snap-Apple Night and the Badlands, finding within them all hope and magic and friendship that will continue to sustain me, for as long as memory lasts.